Tempt Me Tonight (2 page)

Light-headed, she let go of Debbie to grip the doorjamb.

Her knees went weak as more words spilled from Debbie’s lips, words she could barely absorb—something about Beverly having beer, and about her telling everyone at the DQ today that she did it with Joe Ramsey last night. “Kenny asked him,” Deb gently continued. Kenny was Debbie’s boyfriend and Joe’s best friend. “Joe didn’t deny it.”

Trish stood very still, her chest throbbing, her throat clenched. She tried to speak but couldn’t get anything out. She loved Joe. With her whole heart. He loved her, too—didn’t he?

And yet the guy she’d been planning to marry…
had given himself to someone else?

This couldn’t be real.

She held the doorframe tighter to keep from going down.

Debbie leaned to look inside the house, to make sure they were still alone, then went on somberly. “He told Kenny he fucked up. Kenny said he was really upset, quiet, that he was holding his head in his hands.”

Trish let out a shaky breath, still trying to grasp, believe…the impossible. Joe had really cheated on her?

No. No—he couldn’t have.

And yet, if he’d practically admitted it…

Her gaze drifted blankly down her friend’s tank top, to her tennis shoes, to the bristly welcome mat below. Then her knees gave out and she sank to the hardwood floor. “Oh God.”

“I’m so sorry, Trish,” Debbie said, kneeling down in the doorway with her. “So, so sorry.”

Deb’s arms closed around her, but Trish could barely feel them. Because all the bones in her body seemed to be dissolving away to nothing. Because her chest was caving in. How could this be?

That’s when everything inside her burst loose, like a dam breaking, and tears flowed hot and thick down her cheeks onto Debbie’s shoulder as she collapsed a little deeper into her friend’s supporting arms.
How could you, Joe? How could you?

“We need to think through this,” Debbie finally said through her own tears. “We need to figure out what you’re gonna do.”

But Trish didn’t want to think. Thinking
hurt.
She didn’t want to think about Joe with another girl. She didn’t want to think about how her heart was shattering. Instead, she wanted to run.

And fortunately, she had someplace to run
to.
College. Two hours and a world away. She swallowed hard and shook her head. “I just want to go. I just want to get out of this stupid town and never think about this again.”

Debbie’s face scrunched with confusion. “That’s impossible.”

Yet Trish shook her head, resolute, even if a bit unbalanced at the moment. “No, it’s not. And it’s exactly what I’m gonna do.
I don’t need him
. I…I
hate
him. How could he do this to me?” She met Debbie’s gaze, helpless and incredulous all over again.

Deb’s cheeks still glistened with tears, and her voice sounded sad and small. “I don’t know, Trish, I don’t know. But…” She sighed. “God, what should I tell him? He’ll ask me if you know.”

Without warning, something ferocious rose up in Trish, some part of herself she’d never encountered. “Tell him I never want to hear from him again for as long as I live!”

Debbie blinked behind her glasses. “Really? That’s what you want me to say?”

What else
could
she say? “Yes. Because nothing could fix this. Ever.” She let out a heavy breath.

And then she began to sob—a sound that grew from deep inside as despair started to consume her. She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth, wetness streaming down her cheeks, and Debbie rocked with her.
“How could you, Joe? How could you?”
she heard herself whisper.

She’d never thought, never even imagined…She’d always
trusted
him. Without question or doubt. Completely.
Blindly.
She’d never dreamed he could ever…she’d thought it was only
him and her, in love, forever.

That same question kept playing over in her mind like one of her mom’s old records with the skips in them:
How could you? How could you?
But as a few minutes began to pass, as it started to sink in deeper that this was
real
—it had really
happened
—the only answer she could come up with was sad but simple: He just didn’t love her the way he’d always promised he did.

And nothing in her life would ever be the same again.

Plea:
an accused person’s answer to a criminal charge. For example: not guilty; guilty; no contest;
or
an appeal, an earnest request.

Halfway between Cincinnati and Indianapolis, south of I-74, set God’s country. Trish supposed many thousands of rural or dramatic landscapes had been referred to using those same words, but she hadn’t known that when, at the age of seven, she’d sat perched on her Grandpa Henderson’s knee and he’d told her she was looking out at God’s country in all its splendor. All she’d seen was a wide cornfield, a line of trees, and the horizon, feeling—even then—the vague urge to somehow look beyond it all, to whatever was on the other side of the picture. And she never came home to Eden, Indiana without remembering the love of the place she’d seen in her grandfather’s eyes on a day when she’d really been much more focused on the fact that she’d scuffed her new black patent leathers coming out of church. A girl had to be concerned about her shoes, after all.

She wondered now if Grandpa Henderson, God rest his soul, would see the irony or humor in the fact that she was driving toward a
bar
on the outskirts of God’s country—the Last Chance Tavern. Last chance for a beer before entering God’s country, she supposed. Or before leaving it.

“Here—turn here,” Debbie said next to her.

Trish’s stomach churned lightly as she angled her Lexus into the wide gravel parking lot dotted with cars and a few pickups. She really
didn’t
want to be here. “And we’re coming here, again, why?”

Debbie shoved a lock of thin brown hair from her face. “Kenny wants to see you, and it’s pool night.”

Trish nodded dryly, resisting the urge to point out that Kenny had the entire next week to see her. “Well, we wouldn’t want Kenny to miss pool night.”

Debbie blinked, looking miffed. “Kenny works hard and looks forward to Friday nights when Mom keeps the kids.”

“Sorry.” Trish sighed, feeling at once guilty and justified. She didn’t want to be here because she simply didn’t
fit
here anymore. She knew it to the marrow of her bones—but despite the fact that she regularly dealt with hardened criminals from all walks of life without flinching, she felt an absurd dread faced with strolling into the Last Chance. She scrunched up her nose. “I guess I just would have enjoyed…dinner or something—more than this.”

“You can come over and watch the boys hurl mashed potatoes at each other one night next week if you want. But Friday night is pool night.”

Trish parked beneath a security light mounted on a large pole, choosing a spot a few car widths from a large pickup sporting mudflaps embellished with chrome silhouettes of naked women.

She tried not to let Debbie see her grimace, but those mudflaps always gave her the creeps. It was as if they said women were just nameless, faceless sex objects.
Bleck.
Then she flinched slightly.
Please don’t let that be Kenny’s truck.

As she got out, pushing the button on her keychain to lock the doors, Debbie made a face over the roof of the car. “This is home, Trish—not Indianapolis.”

Trish raised her eyebrows. “No one steals things from cars here?”

Looking as smug as Trish felt, Debbie shook her head. “No—they don’t.”

Which was when it hit Trish—they probably didn’t. Even now. Not in Eden. There might be bars and chrome women on mudflaps, but she supposed that, in a sense, it really
was
still God’s country. “Oh. Guess I forgot that for a minute.” But she still left the car locked.

Over the years,
home
had become an entirely relative term in her life—this was where her parents lived, and where Debbie lived, but it wasn’t
her
home anymore. She’d been back countless times over the years—every Thanksgiving and Christmas, sometimes for a Sunday dinner with relatives—yet this was different. This was the first time she’d actually come to
stay
for awhile. A week or so. This was the first time she hadn’t just whizzed in and out of town for a day, or maybe an overnight stay that included a quick visit with Debbie and Kenny. This was the first time she’d be here long enough that she’d have to
see
people. People she hadn’t seen in forever. People she’d never expected to see again.
Double bleck.

“Rowdy Lancaster owns this place now,” Debbie pointed out as they trod through the gravel toward the front door of the flat, one-story building painted a dull shade of brown. Through cloudy windows glowed mini-Christmas lights strung around neon beer signs, and a muted Garth Brooks song echoed through the walls.

She remembered Rowdy as a good-natured boy with red hair who’d raised 4-H award-winning calves in high school. So maybe saying hello to him wouldn’t be awful. “I always liked Rowdy,” she offered, trying to cheer herself up. Then, three steps from a heavy-looking steel door sporting the stenciled words
LAST
CHANCE
, she posed the question she’d been trying to be too mature to ask. “Who else will be here?”

Debbie began rambling off a list of names that conjured vague images from high school, explaining that a couple of them worked at the plant with Kenny, and concluding with, “That’s pretty much our Friday night crowd.”

And Trish’s stomach hollowed. At the strange realization that…life had gone on here. All the same people were still here—only grown up now, living their lives. Debbie and Kenny had a “Friday night crowd” made up of people Trish barely knew, only remembered dimly from her past. How had that happened? How had she ended up knowing so little about her best friend’s life?

It wasn’t as if she’d thought life in Eden had come to a grinding halt at her departure, but she supposed she’d been so caught up in her own existence all this time that she’d somehow forgotten everything else. And walking into the Last Chance was going to give her a taste of something she hadn’t thought about in a very long while—the life
she’d
once planned to lead here.
Bleck to the tenth power.

Not that Eden was an awful place. It was quaint in its way. But
its
way wasn’t
her
way and hadn’t been for a long time. It was hard to believe she’d
ever
belonged here.

Trish flicked her gaze to Debbie then, hating herself for even letting this enter her mind, but…“Anybody else I know?”

“I wouldn’t expect Joe to be here, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

She shrugged. It was
exactly
what she was wondering. “Not that it really matters,” she assured Debbie. And it didn’t. As life had worked out, she hadn’t seen Joe Ramsey since she’d left for college and that suited her fine. After mailing off a long, angry letter to him a week after departing for IU, in which she’d reiterated the “never want to hear from you for as long as I live” part, she’d done exactly what she’d told Debbie she was going to do—she’d moved on. It hadn’t happened overnight, of course; he’d broken her young heart, which had taught her to guard it a lot more closely. But she
had
long since gotten over him—she just didn’t particularly wish to run into him in a bar nearly fifteen years after he’d made a colossal fool of her.

And for heaven’s sake, why does any of this even matter? Just go in, have a glass of wine, talk with Kenny—then claim exhaustion and leave. Getting this evening behind you will put you one night closer to going home—to your
real
home, your
real
life.

Having steeled herself with that little pep talk, she boldly grabbed the door handle and pulled.

Garth’s “That Summer” filled her ears as she followed Debbie inside. A long bar lined the left wall, two pool tables sat in the back near an old-fashioned jukebox, and the rest of the room was dotted with mismatched tables and chairs. Few of the tables were occupied, but a small group stood around watching Kenny and an older version of a boy she recognized from high school shoot pool. Light laughter rose at something Kenny said.

Trish spotted Rowdy behind the bar then—older, too, but still red-haired, although it looked thinner than when she’d known him before. He chatted with a dark-haired guy seated on a stool across from him, and her eyes stuck on the tattoo of a cobra coiled on the guy’s muscular biceps, which moved slightly when he lifted his beer bottle for a drink. Something inside her stirred unexpectedly, making her wonder when she’d started finding snake tattoos sexy.

She usually thought anything having to do with snakes was pretty ooky, and if she were going to get something permanently engraved on her arm, it would not have been a member of the reptile family. But something about
this
snake seemed to appeal to her inner biker chick. Although it was the first time she realized she
had
an inner biker chick.

It was only when the tattoo guy glanced in her direction that she nearly fainted.

Joe.

His warm gaze locked on her instantly and she knew he was just as surprised to see her as she was to see him. She couldn’t blame him—it had been almost half their lives ago that they’d spent long summer nights writhing against each other in that old Trans Am, or anywhere else they could steal a few minutes alone, and suddenly, here she was, walking into the Last Chance.

Of course, nearly fainting wasn’t just about seeing Joe. It was about seeing Joe looking like the hottest thing ever poured into a pair of faded blue jeans. It was about his thick, dark hair—just as lustrous as when she’d last run her hands through it. It was about his jaw, covered with heavier stubble than when he’d been a boy. It was about broad shoulders and well-muscled arms and suddenly being faced with an all-grown-up version of Joe Ramsey who could probably get a woman on her back with no more than a look—the look he happened to be casting in her direction right now. Oh boy.