Called Up (26 page)

She closed her eyes and let her head fall back to the wall when she heard him say, “We’re not doing this here.”

“That never bothered you before,” Peggy purred. And Fitz had no doubt she was plastering those boobs right up against his chest.

“Not what I meant,” he muttered.

The air turned about thirty degrees colder when Peggy answered, “Then what
did
you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean,” Deke said, clearly not in the mood to talk to Peggy either. Hopefully he was also taking this moment to disentangle himself from Peggy’s arms and push her to the side, although Fitz had no leg to stand on at the moment.

There was a moment of silence before Peggy’s satisfyingly astounded, “You aren’t seriously still having your summer fling, are you?” Then her voice turned sultry again. “It’s been too long, baby.” Despite the noise of the bar behind her, Fitz could hear the sound of a zipper being pulled down loud and clear.

And then, thank all of the gods that were out there, the sound of it going decidedly back up.

“Okay, then,” he muttered. “So we’re doing this here after all.”

Peggy practically squealed in delight, only to have Deke cut her off with, “Not
that
. We...” He paused and took an audible breath. “We’re not having sex again, Peggy. We’re done.”

“We’re...
What?
” Peggy went from incredulous to furious in no time at all. “It’s Suzie, isn’t it. She’s the one you’ve been with all summer. I
knew
you were sleeping with her, that little bitch.”

“It’s not Suzie,” Deke sighed. And over Peggy’s next question, he added, “And it’s not Rayna.”

Who the hell was Rayna?

“Jesus, Peggy, it’s not about any of them. Just...” He sounded tired.
So
worn down. “Look, what we had was good and I’d like to remember it that way. But there’s a lot working against you right now, and believe me when I say it’s in your best interest to let this go.”

Fitz had known Deke for a long time. She’d seen a lot of different sides of him over the years, even more so in the last few months. But never once had she known his voice to sound so
scary
. Cold. She was so taken aback, in fact, her heart pounding so loudly, she almost missed Peggy’s quiet, “What exactly do you mean by that?”

And his response was so low and quiet back, Fitz could barely hear it. “It means that you hurt people I care about—”

“Oh my, God.
Fitz?
” Peggy said, with that special sneered emphasis on the name that even Jeremiah had never added.

“Yes, Fitz. Jesus, Peggy,” he said, “you used
my
name to get her alone with three assholes who were twice her size. You knew exactly what those guys were like, and yet you lured her there like the fucking big bad wolf.”

“They didn’t rape her,” Peggy snapped, as if that made everything all right. “And I already paid for that. Nate broke up with me and hasn’t spoken to me since.”

Deke snapped right back, “Because what you did was
heinous
. I wouldn’t have spoken to you since that day, either, if I’d known.”

“But you didn’t know, Deke, did you? Nate knew. Jeremiah knew... And no more than three weeks after it happened, you were balls deep inside of me and making me scream.”

“Jesus,” Deke muttered, echoing Fitz’s thoughts exactly.

But Peggy wasn’t done. “I’m thinking it’s more that you didn’t want to know. You
like
everyone at a distance. You keep them there. You watch over them from behind that bar, but you never get too close. Honestly? I always expected your precious Fitz would have told you a lot sooner. But you can tell her right back for me that she needs to get over it. It was sixteen years ago.”

Bitch.

Fitz hated her.
Hated.
Never in her life had Fitz wanted so badly to physically hurt someone. But before she could do so much as take a step forward, she heard Deke’s voice, menacing and low. “Fitz
is
over it. She is so fucking over it, it kind of pisses me off.”

Yes, he’d made that clear.

“But
I’m
not. I won’t ever be. I liked you, Peggy. We’ve spent a lot of years having a really good time. But what you did—what you used
my name
to do? That’s not something I can forgive you for. And I’ll go to my grave knowing I’m the reason she could never quite be free of you.”

Oh, God. Oh,
Deke
.

“Don’t do this,” Peggy warned. “The things I can say about you... It will make standing behind that bar every night pretty damn uncomfortable.”

No.
Fitz closed her eyes. This was exactly what she didn’t want; what she’d wanted to protect him from. The reason she’d sworn Nate to secrecy all those years ago. This bar was his home. His
life
. It meant everything to him. With a deep breath she pushed herself off the wall again, this time with every intention of finally stepping forward and redirecting Peggy’s hate back where it belonged, no matter how uncomfortable it was.

Except Scary Deke came through again. “You say whatever you want to who-the-fuck-ever you want. I’m not ashamed of anything we ever said or did together. I honestly don’t give a fuck. There’s no one in this town that I care about who chooses you over me.”

And with that, he suddenly came around the corner, his head still turned back to Peggy, but so close that all Fitz needed to do was reach her arm out to touch him. Yet she couldn’t. Not the way he’d reacted before. She pulled her arms in tight.

It was enough to draw his attention to her, and he jerked to a halt. When their eyes met, the entire world came to a stop. Then it shifted, and Fitz hoped with everything she had she could hold on. The spell wasn’t even broken as Peggy came around from behind him and pushed past Deke, obviously angry as hell. Out of the corner of her eye, Fitz could see the other woman straighten up a bit as she muttered, “Perfect,” before passing right between them and moving away.

“I’m...” Fitz whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

He was the one to break the stare, looking down at the floor. When he spoke, his voice was gruff in a way she’d rarely heard. “Am I delusional? Am I the only one who thought we were actually moving towards something we both wanted to explore?” Then he took a step closer. “Is there not something kind of big going on here?”

“I...” She bit her lip again so that it would stop quivering long enough for her to actually speak. “Yes. You know I think there is.”

“Then why in the
fuck
,” he spat out, “did you not tell me you’re up for a new job?” He came right up to her, angrier than she’d ever seen him. “A job that I’m pretty sure means you’ll have to move away, for
fuck’s
sake.”

Yes, he was angry. Yes, he deserved to be. “I’m...”

All the reasons she hadn’t told him ran through her head. Not a single one of them made one bit of sense now.

“I am an
idiot
,” he muttered, pacing back and forth. “Here I am, walking around on Cloud Nine because seeing you in my bar made me start to think about what our future might look like. You and me and some kids to pass it all along to one day.”

Wait.
What?
She panicked at the thought of coming out to Jason and Wash. Marriage was the
last
thing on her mind.
Kids?
“I never said...”

“That’s right, Fitz,” he hissed. “You never said. But the thing is, you don’t ever actually say
anything
, so I’m kind of used to figuring it out on my own. Guess I got a big F on that one.”

“I know,
okay
?” she said, needing him to stop. “I know I should have told you! I know I handled it all wrong! But I...” But she
what
? Even she had no idea what came at the end of that. She fell back against the wall, her hands against it, holding her up. “Nate and Dorie were the only ones who knew. And only because Nate’s on the interviewing committee. It’s not like I was going around telling everyone else. You would have been the
first
person I told.”

He stared at her for a minute. Then he shook his head. “How do you not get this?” He took a few steps closer. “I don’t give a
shit
if you told everyone else. You can take out an ad in the
Chicago Tribune
, for all I care. What matters is that you didn’t tell
me
. That you actually
kept
it from me.” He took a step back. “Is that what was going on with Price and Whitfield that night?” His eyes went to the floor before he looked up at her again. “The worst part is that I actually knew there was something you weren’t telling me.” He shook his head and gave the most bitter laugh ever. “I’d actually convinced myself it was that you were falling as hard as I was, you just couldn’t quite get up the nerve to—”

“I was,” she said, stepping toward him and trying not to cry when he took a step back. “I
did
.” She felt back for the wall, needing it to keep her upright.

Not coming any closer he shook his head. “Did it not occur to you I might just want to freaking know?”

“Why?” she asked. “So you could talk me out of it? Tell me I should stay here in Inspiration? That you’d be the one to take care of me? That you’re the one who would
fix
me?”

That seemed to make him even angrier than before. “Where the fuck do you get these things?” His hand came down on the wall next to her head as he leaned in close. “No, Fitz,” he said, his voice quiet and cold. “So that I could be
happy
for you. So that I could cheer you on. So that I could tell the fucking
world
that the woman I am goddamn in love with is about to head up Sam Price’s new foundation.”

Oh.

“You... You’re in love with me?”

Okay. So, yes, she’d been pretty sure that’s what had been happening, as frightening as the idea of it had been.

“Yes, Fitz. I love you. I think maybe I’ve been a little bit in love with you since the first day I saw you at the Jensens’ farmhouse. If Peggy had told me that day Angelica Wade was out behind the equipment shed, I would have been out there in a second.”

“You would have?” That was good... Right? All these things he was saying were good.

So why did she feel like her whole world was about to be torn apart?

Probably because she knew the next words out of his mouth would be, “But I can’t do this anymore.”

And it felt exactly as she’d expected it would. Like somewhere inside of her, something had been ripped out.
Torn
out, no less devastating than the sudden loss of her mother’s arms around her, that last grasp of her hand. It took everything Fitz had to stay standing.
Breathing.

He gave not one bit of ground as his eyes went hard. “I love you, Fitz. I do. I want to spend my life kissing you. Watching your eyes come alive whether it’s because you’re under me in my bed or at the head of a boardroom running Sam Price’s freaking show. I needed two things, Fitz. Just two. Honesty and trust.”

If the sob hadn’t frozen in her throat along with every other cell in her body, it would have erupted right out of her. Especially when he looked down for a minute—maybe ten; everything was frozen at the moment—and when his eyes came back to hers he seemed nearly as torn up as she was. “I hate that you feel the way you do. I would do anything to make you happy. Anything I could to make you feel like you don’t need to do this alone. I honest-to-God would.”

He took a step backward. Still close enough to touch, yet he held himself back. “I’m not going to try to talk you into something you don’t believe in, but I can’t keep giving everything I have to someone who won’t even meet me halfway.” Then he shoved his hands into his pockets and his eyes went down to the floor. “Yeah, I’m done.”

He turned and walked away.

“Wait...” She started to go after him, stopping only when she saw the way his shoulders tensed when he stopped a few feet away.

He was truly going to do this then? Just go like her father had?

“You’re
leaving
me?” She wrapped her arms around her body, trying to keep her insides from falling out. “That’s it? The end?”

His head dipped down for a minute as he answered, “I’m not the one leaving, Fitz. If you ever want to find me, you know exactly where I’ll be.”

Right. Because she did know him. She trusted him. Deke was the only man she trusted as resolutely as she had her dad, in fact, up until her father’s past transgressions had blown it all away. But for the first time since the day she’d learned what her father had done, she realized it wasn’t the men in her life that were the problem. They weren’t who she couldn’t trust, the ones who would disappoint her the way her father had.

S
he
was.

And she stood there, stunned, as he disappeared from sight.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

It did strike Deke as ironic that after a lifetime of making sure his relationships with women weren’t strong enough to require severing them, he’d essentially broken up with two in the span of five minutes.

Christ.

He hadn’t meant to end it with Fitz. He didn’t
want
to end it. And it took everything he had not to turn and go back to her.

Resisting the urge to walk right out, the feeling of defeat he’d never before experienced until this very moment, Deke looked around and realized he’d taken himself back out to the bar, and was now just standing there while Josh looked at him as though he had two heads. He wasn’t quite up to speaking to anyone yet so he was about to make the rounds of busing tables when Wash and Dorie both spoke, practically at the same exact moment.

“Did you give her the boot?” Wash asked as Dorie snapped, “What the...?”

Deke looked up to see Wash staring across the room at Peggy while Dorie looked over his shoulder at Fitz. Dorie acted first. With a scathing glare, she was off the stool before Deke even realized she was moving, and on her way to Fitz. Wash, on the other hand, as with just about every other person in the place, had turned his attention to the scene taking place between Peggy and Lola.

It was a beauty. Since Peggy had decided he’d done her wrong, it apparently gave her license to tear up her bill and throw it in the waitress’s face. She had no shame whatsoever about letting the entire place know she was
not
paying for today’s lunch because, “Your brother’s an asshole!” Which was freaking perfect. Peggy, of all people, was the one throwing a hissy fit. She was chewing out Lola, chewing out the waitress, spewing her hate on everyone except the one person she should: him.

Jesus Christ. Within the hour, the whole freaking town would be talking about him and
Peggy
when what he really wanted was to shout out that Fitz was the one he was in love with, and—

Yes. He was in love with Fitz.

Goddamn, fucking, kicking the shit out of you, love.

He yanked the bin of dirty dishes out of its place.

But even if he had come to that particular revelation, it didn’t change a damn thing. There was no way he could take back what he’d said. No way to fix it, either. He was who he was and Fitz was who she was. She was never going to go against everything she believed to be true—or, for that matter, break down any of those walls. Even for him.

“God
damn
it!”

The words exploded out of him in such a roar that everything around him came to a screeching halt. Heads turned, mouths dropped open, even Peggy stopped what she was saying, midstream. It was like Godzilla himself had appeared and was crashing and thrashing his way through town.

Except it wasn’t Godzilla thrashing around, it was him. Easygoing, let-everything-roll-off-his-back Max Deacon had just slammed down a bin full of dishes—
slammed
it—and was now stalking his way across the room. He felt strange in his own skin even as he came to a stop in front of Peggy. “Get out.”

“What?” she asked, as though no one had ever called her on her shit.

Well, probably, no one ever had. He sure hadn’t.

“Get your bag...” He stepped in close enough for her to have to tip her head back. “Take your jacket...” And he was quiet enough that only he, Lola and Peggy’s friends could hear him, although that was a freaking favor she did not deserve. “And get. The
fuck
. Out.” Another step, and now she was stepping back as well.

Her surprise turned to attitude. “This is a public place. You can’t tell me to leave. Your father would never—”

Ignoring her protests, he hissed, “And don’t fucking
ever
speak to my sister or our staff like that again.”

Her mouth gaped open. She shut it, opened it and then shut it again. She glared at him. “Fine,” she said, snatching her bag and tucking it under her arm. Then she went on the offensive, stepping right up to him this time. “I sure hope she’s worth it because you’ve just lost a hell of a lot of business.”

Yeah, he probably had. Peggy’s father was president of the Rotary Club, her mom was second only to Mama Gin in terms of town matriarchs, and Peggy headed up the Jaycees. Plus, Peggy’s crowd tended to frequent the bar more often than not. Between the three of them, they brought him a lot of business and he’d clearly put an end to that.

He didn’t give a freaking shit.

Ignoring the concerned looks of Lola and his friends, not to mention the not-at-all-contained curiosity of a large portion of the rest of the crowd, he turned his back on her. Threw his apron down on the table and said to Josh, “You have the bar. I’m going fishing.”

Peace the fuck out.

* * *

Fitz was numb. She felt hollowed out—no heart to beat, no lungs to breathe. She barely had enough air to speak, much less scream.

Oh, how she wanted to scream.

“I...” she gasped, feeling Dorie’s arms go around her and pull her into a hug. “I can’t...”

Breathe. She couldn’t breathe.

Before she knew what was happening, she was being propelled through the back hallway.

One minute she was standing there watching Peggy yell at Lola, and the next she was in the alley behind Deke’s bar.

“Oh, God.”

Tears spilled out of her eyes and she didn’t know why. She expected nothing from him. She expected nothing, period. No one to answer to, no one to make promises he wouldn’t be able to keep, no one to count on other than her own reliable self.

And then, suddenly, all the feelings she hadn’t been able to feel came to her in an all-consuming roar. Her heart started pounding, her lungs burned and the scream she couldn’t get out filled her head. She was trembling—
sobbing
—and still completely unable to breathe.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” Dorie was murmuring in her ear. “It’s going to be okay.”

No, it wasn’t. Nothing was going to be okay.

She wished she were different. That she’d grown up the way everyone else had—fighting with her mom. Hating her dad for giving her a curfew. Complaining that the dinner wasn’t what she wanted, that her clothes were all wrong, that...

She wanted her mother, goddamn it. Her dad. She wanted her family back.

She wanted all the things that could never be.

She felt her legs buckle beneath her, felt her body curl into itself. Felt the light she’d had for such a short while fade to black.

“What the hell happened?” she heard Nate ask and then a murmured response as Dorie answered.

Completely unable to deal with any of it, she rested her head against something solid, realizing belatedly it was Nate’s chest, and that he’d picked her up off the stairs outside Dorie’s apartment, where she’d apparently come to a stop before sinking down to the floor.

She remembered even less after that. There was the sense of dark clouds whirling around her, of falling through space, of fear and chaos and an overwhelming roar as everything around her was shaken and tossed. When her eyes snapped open, she saw her father sitting there, across the room, smiling and looking down at her mom with such tenderness that she felt her whole being swell with joy as she woke up from the horrible nightmare of...

Yes, she’d fallen asleep, but this wasn’t a nightmare she could wake out of. There had been a tornado. It
had
taken them away. And that wasn’t her father in front of her, it was...

Nate’s head snapped up. Smile gone, he pulled away from Dorie. “You’re awake. What the hell did Deke—”

“Oh, my God.” Mama Gin was right. Nate looked exactly like their father. How had she never seen it before, not once, in all these years?

Maybe because she’d never allowed herself to remember the way their father had looked at her mother, the same way Nate looked at Dorie. Because they
had
been in love. What he’d done had been horrible enough for Fitz to not be able to get past it. Before all that, though. Before she’d become part of the scandal he’d created, what was there between her parents had been strong enough for them to face whatever lay ahead of them. Together.

And Fitz’s heart broke all over again. For all this time, she’d refused to even consider the possibility of falling in love. The idea of what it meant both to have and to lose something so utterly profound had scared her too much. So she’d used her anger as an excuse to play it safe, to sit there in her comfort zone while Deke took a running jump straight off the edge of the cliff.

For her.

She looked up to see Nate still watching her, his eyes cold and his lips settled into a grim line. His voice tight with anger, he repeated, “What did Deke do?”

With his hands at his side and his eyes radiating fury, Fitz was afraid he might kill Deke. Maim him, at the very least.

Dorie was clearly also ready to lay into Deke, although she had a much softer touch. Coming over to the couch and putting her arm around Fitz, she said, “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it, we—”

Her gaze flew up to Nate’s as he cut her off, saying, “
I
want to talk about it,” fists clenching. “As soon as I can find him, at least.”

Fitz leaned forward, a tiny bit of panic flaring up as she looked out the window at the sky that seemed ominously darker than it had only a moment before. “He’s not at the bar?”

The grim look came over Nate’s face again as Dorie frowned and said, “He apparently decided to go fishing.”

Fishing?
Images from her dream came rushing back. The helplessness of being caught in the storm. “Call Lola,” she demanded, the fear taking over.

With an apologetic look, Dorie shook her head. “Lola says there must have been some kind of misunderstanding because, I quote, ‘Deke and Fitz are totally in love,’ end quote, and that the two of you need to figure this out.”

The sob rose up through Fitz’s chest so quickly that she had to gulp in air in order to breathe. And gulp it in again.

Yes, she should have told him about the job. She knew that. But she hadn’t been ready for
anything
to happen the way it did. Not the job, and definitely not him. “He... He changed the rules.” They would have been fine if it had all stayed the way it was supposed to. “It was...” She buried her head in her hands; there was no way she could meet Dorie’s eyes, much less Nate’s. “It was just supposed to be...”

Before she could muster up the courage to say the word, however, Dorie made a sound that was half gasp, half laugh, while Nate sighed. When Fitz looked up, she could see he’d put his hand to his forehead and had his eyes closed. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he said, “If the ending to that fucking phrase is ‘sex,’ I am seriously going to...”

Dorie snorted as his voice trailed off and he glared at her. Fitz was obviously missing something, but she wasn’t about to interrupt.

“And I suddenly find myself in Deke’s corner,” he muttered.

“Oh, honey,” Dorie said, pulling Fitz into a hug. “It will all work out. I honestly believe that.”

Well, of course
Dorie
believed. Dorie had a man who worshipped the ground—

“Did you hear that?” Dorie asked, cocking her head at the sound of sirens in the distance.

“Shit,” Nate muttered, going for the remote and turning on the TV.

“My phone,” Fitz snapped, jumping to her feet. “Where is it?”

“We turned them off...” Dorie’s mouth dropped open as she stared at the image on the TV. The one showing a map with Inspiration in the middle of it and flashing red all around it.

Shutting off the TV, Nate was already in motion, grabbing Dorie’s hand and pulling her from the couch. “We need to go.”

Right. Because for some ridiculous reason, over half the buildings in town didn’t have basements even though they lived in freaking tornado alley. And although almost all of the buildings in town had been damaged by the last tornado, not nearly enough of them had been bad enough to require rebuilding from the ground up. Deacon’s was one of the few in this part of town with a basement because they’d run a bar there during Prohibition.

But Fitz couldn’t move. Standing there staring at the TV, the map was imprinted on her mind even though the TV was now off. If he’d really gone fishing, then he was right there in the middle of all that red.

“God
damn
it, Fitz,” Nate yelled from the doorway. “Come on!”

She ran out after them, down the stairs and out onto the street. She even turned to run toward the bar right along with Nate and Dorie and every other person who had any sense, when the sight of the sky stopped her cold. It wasn’t the way she remembered it. She’d always had a picture in her head of a disaster movie-type funnel cloud, but the reality was that she’d never seen it. She’d been so scared she’d just huddled in the backseat, her eyes squeezed shut as the winds battered the car.

This could barely even be called a cloud, it was that big. Still in the distance, but huge and pitch black as it crowded the color out of the sky. She honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if a cow came flying across the road.

Yes, she had screwed things up. Yes,
she
was the one who’d come close to destroying the best thing she’d ever have.
But you want faith, Deke? Here you go. Angelica Hawkins is fighting her way back to you no matter what stands in the way.

Even if it was a tornado. A big one.

But what-the-fuck-ever.

She ran across the street to where Nate’s car was parked, because, yes, thank you, God, he kept his keys tucked in the visor. It drove Dorie crazy.

She got in and powered it up and... Holy
cow
that was a lot of engine.

Well, good.

You know what, Universe?
No.

No. Freaking.
Way.