Slowly We Trust (10 page)

“Sure, nice to meet you,” Eddie said, nodding at Will.

“Same here. Small world, isn’t it?” Will was smiling, but I could tell it wasn’t one of his real smiles. He had seen my face when I’d first caught sight of Eddie and it told him that I wasn’t thrilled to see Eddie. That was an understatement.

“There you are!” Lottie’s voice cut through the noise and the crowd and then there was an arm around my waist.

“Who’s this?” she said, staring at Eddie.

“Eddie,” he said, nodding at her as Zan, Simon, Brady, Trish, Max, Katie and Stryker all came in behind Lottie. The gang was all here. No getting out of this situation now.

“We knew each other in high school,” I said to the new arrivals as Eddie introduced himself to everyone. It was the easiest explanation that wasn’t an actual explanation.

“Okay, well it was nice to meet you all and see you again, Audrey. Maybe we could catch up or something sometime.” He winked and headed off in the direction of a clutch of guys who were all yelling about something.

“You owe me an explanation,” Lottie said, pulling me down so she could whisper in my ear. I turned my head and she gave me a look. I was getting a lot of those right now.

“I think I need a drink,” Will said.

“Aren’t you the DD?” Lottie pointed out.

“Shit, yeah.” I turned to him and all I could see were the questions in his eyes. It didn’t take a genius to see that there was history between Eddie and me and I wasn’t being forthcoming.

“Let’s go find somewhere to talk,” I said in a low voice so only Will could hear. He nodded and gave Lottie a look. She nodded and rounded everyone up to go get drinks as Will took my hand and led me to the stairs.

He must have been in this house before because he found an unoccupied bedroom. I walked in and he shut the door behind me. The party noise seeped through the floor, but the room was relatively soundproof.

“Are you okay?” Will said, reaching out as if he wanted to hug me. “I saw your face when that guy came over.” I was confused for a moment. I’d thought he was going to be pissed at me for not telling him about Eddie, but the more I thought about that, the more I realized he had no reason to be pissed. He didn’t know the details of my past relationship with Eddie and I definitely didn’t want him to find out.

“I . . . I’m fine. It was just a shock, to see someone from high school, that’s all.” I hoped he bought it.

His eyebrows contracted and he dropped his hands and put them in his pockets.

“Are you sure? I thought you’d seen a zombie or something. That’s not the kind of reaction you have when it’s just a high school friend. Do you have history or something with him?” He tried to ask the last part casually, but I could sense his desire to know what Eddie and I had shared.

I sighed as if I didn’t want to unburden myself.

“I had a crush on him in high school, okay? I kind of made a fool of myself and he rejected me and it was embarrassing.” This was partly true.

Will looked at me as if I’d grown an extra head.

“You really expect me to believe
that guy
rejected
you
?” Okay, so that part wasn’t completely true. I’d added that as my reason for not wanting to see Eddie. “Nope, that definitely didn’t happen. Unless he’s an idiot. Or has brain damage. Or is an alien life form.” Eddie was none of those things. Well, he was a bit of an idiot, which I didn’t realize until after the glow of having a crush on him for several years wore off. Still, he wasn’t a bad guy. What happened between us was both of our faults.

“You didn’t know me in high school, Will. I was really awkward there for a while.” I still felt awkward ninety percent of the time. Will continued to look at me as if I was suddenly speaking in a foreign language. I walked over and sat on one of the beds crammed into the room. It probably wasn’t the best idea, sitting on a stranger’s bed, but I needed to sit down. Will came and sat next to me. The sheets smelled a bit funky, but I tried not to breathe too deeply.

“Aud?” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

No, I wasn’t. I was far from it. My head was spinning, taking me back to another party, one where I’d had more than a few drinks and Eddie had been there and . . .

No. With all of my mental force, I pushed those memories aside. They weren’t allowed to come out now, not when I was with Will.

“Yeah, I’m okay. Really.” I smiled and tried to make it genuine.

He rubbed my shoulder and moved his hand to my back. I leaned on him and he wrapped his other arm around me.

There is something so comforting about just being held by someone you care about. Will rubbed my back, making little circles as the music pounded on below us and the party continued without interruption.

“Thanks for being here with me,” I said after a little while. “You’re always there for me.”

Will shifted so he could look at me.

“Where else would I be?” He touched my chin, holding it as if he was going to pull my face up for a kiss. I wanted him to. I wanted him to kiss me and make me forget about Eddie. Forget about my past.

“With someone that treats you better.” With someone who would appreciate him.

“I don’t want someone else. It’s you I want.” He ran his thumb back and forth on my lips. “Unless you don’t want me.”

Oh, but I did.

“I do want you.” It was the first time I’d actually said it out loud. He inhaled sharply and then smiled.

“Good. Because I was about ready to beat the shit out of that Eddie guy if you still had a thing for him.”

“Real mature, Will,” I said against his thumb. At least he hadn’t quoted Star Wars, even though I thought that was pretty adorable.

He moved his thumb and crushed his lips against mine with so much force we both fell back on the bed. I wasn’t thinking (much) about how clean the blankets were, or the fact that I was in someone else’s house.

All I could think of was Will. All I wanted to think of was him. Not Eddie. Not the last few years. Nothing but Will.

All I saw, all I tasted, all I felt was his body. His warm hands holding me, his lips and tongue against my mouth, his breath, the stubble that was just breaking through on his chin, his hips on mine, matching perfectly. I gasped as he pressed against me and growled a little, low in his throat.

“Oops,” a voice said, causing me to break away from Will and smash my nose with his.

“Ow!” I screamed and fell away from him at the same time he yelled, “Shit!”

Squinting up through watering eyes, I saw Lottie standing in the doorway looking both sheepish and not surprised to find us in our present position.

“Are you kidding me right now, Lot?” I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose and wiping tears out of my eyes. “Are you okay?” I hoped I hadn’t hurt Audrey’s face with my stupid nose. She was also rubbing her eyes, but appeared otherwise unharmed.

I knew that Lottie had to know exactly what Audrey and I were up here doing. The question was, why had she cock-blocked me? Sometimes having a twin was the WORST, especially when that twin was a girl who seemed to have a secret agenda she didn’t want to inform you of.

“Just checking you two to make sure you were . . . okay,” Lottie said, her eyes acting all shifty. Her lies weren’t fooling anyone.

“We should, um, go down,” Audrey said, pulling away from me. Shitfuck. Thanks a bunch, Lot. Just when I’d thought Audrey and I were making progress, she had to come and ruin it.

Audrey wouldn’t look at me, but I knew I was outnumbered, so I got up and followed the ladies back down the stairs and into the pounding chaos of the party.

Audrey avoided touching me for the rest of the night. A tiny little microscopic part of me was pissed that things were so hot and cold, off and on, but I knew it wasn’t Audrey’s fault. There was something going on inside of her that she couldn’t face. Some deep dark secret. I’d known this since I first met her and I didn’t need to use the Force to see it.

To be honest, yeah, it hurt that she didn’t think she could trust me with her secret. But even more than the hurt was the fact that she was suffering and there was nothing I could do about it. I wanted to help her, to make it better. I just had no idea how.

When I dropped her off, she sat in the truck for a minute, as if she wanted to say something.

“You know, one of these times you’re going to get mad at me for jerking you around and decide you’re done with me and a little part of me is looking forward to that day. Because then I won’t be jerking you around anymore.” Her voice was quiet, almost too quiet to hear. She twisted her hands together and wouldn’t look at me.

“I’m not mad at you, Aud. I just want to be with you, and here for you, whether that’s as a friend or someone you want to date, or whatever.”

She shook her head.

“Why are you so patient with me?” I didn’t know. Patience wasn’t one of my virtues and my sister didn’t have it either.

“Because you need me to be,” I said before I thought about the words. She brushed her hand across a cheek, maybe wiping a tear away, but before I could ask, she opened the door and was walking toward the door of her building.

I resisted the urge to smash my head on the steering wheel. I wanted to go after her, but I sensed she needed some time alone. I just hoped that time wouldn’t last too long.

“You
knew
what you were walking in on,” I said to Lottie. Simon wanted some alone time with Brady and I’d decided to spend the night at my sister’s. Not that you got much privacy in a dorm room with paper-thin walls, but still.

“Of course I did. But aren’t you glad it was me and not someone else?” Not really.

“We were just . . .” I couldn’t say what we were just about to do to Lottie. I’d never had an issue of discussing my relationships with her before. This was different.

“I know what you were just. With her just. In a nasty apartment, on a stranger’s bed that may or may not contain remnants of several STDs. How absolutely romantic, Will.” She smacked me on the back of the head.

“Hey!” I grabbed her arm and yanked her over the back of the couch, pinning her arms behind her back. “What’s with the hitting?”

She struggled to get free, and I twisted a little.

“My boyfriend is going to kick your ass.”

“Your boyfriend isn’t getting involved,” Zan called from the other side of the room.

“No sex for you,” Lottie called back at him. Ugh, I did NOT want to think about my sister and Zan. Especially not at the present moment.

Lottie finally stopped resisting and I let her go.

“For someone who is so attuned to me, you seem to know next-to-nothing about how women think.” That was definitely not true and she knew it.

“You mean I shouldn’t have tried to make a move on Audrey in someone else’s disgusting bed. That she would want something more special, would deserve something more special. Is that what you’re getting at?”

“Obviously.”

“Well, my answer to that is that I didn’t PLAN anything. She was upset and I was trying to comfort her and then we started kissing and I stopped thinking and then you barged in. Maybe if you’d waited, nothing would have happened anyway.” Nothing had happened, no matter how many times we’d been in compromising positions. We would be kissing and I’d go for something more and she’d stop me, or I would worry that she would want to stop me, so I would beat her to it.

“There’s a whole lot more to this than sex, Lot.”

She gave me a look as if I’d just said the dumbest thing in the history of dumb things.

“Don’t insult my intelligence. I know that what you have is more than just sex. This is the first girl I’ve ever seen you so torn up over. And I may not have known Aud that long, but I can tell that this is different for her, too.”

“Has she . . . has she said anything?”

Lottie shook her head and put her hands up.

“Nope, sorry bro. That breaks Girl Code.” Again with the Girl Code.

“What about Twin Code? Doesn’t that supersede Girl Code?”

She thought about it for a second.

“In some cases, yes, but not in this one. That’s not saying that I know anything. But hypothetically, if I knew something, I couldn’t tell you.”

Sometimes I wondered how I was actually related to her.

“So do you know something, or not?”

“I’m sorry, Will. This is her thing. I’m taking myself out of it. This is between the two of you.” She hopped up from the couch and ran to give Zan a kiss on the cheek.

“Well-played, L.” He smiled down at her as if she’d split the atom.

“Thank you.”

“One of these days, she and I are going to gang up on you and then you’re going to be sorry,” I said to Zan. He didn’t look as terrified as I wanted him to. Seeing as how he was several inches taller than me, it probably wasn’t much of a threat. Lottie, she could do some damage to him, but he was aware of that already.

“Secrets aren’t easy things to carry. Especially when you care about someone and want, more than anything, to tell them,” Zan said. He didn’t talk much, but usually what he said was worth listening to. It was hard to believe that just a few months ago, I’d imagined all the ways I could kill him and now he was a few steps away from being my brother-in-law.

“True. See, we have firsthand experience,” Lottie said.

“So what should I do?”

They looked at each other and seemed to exchange some wordless communication. It was different than how Lottie and I seemed to almost always know what the other was thinking.

“That’s up to you,” Lottie said. “And her. It’s up to you. Together. But you have to decide what you want, and how far you’re willing to go to get it. What you’re willing to accept, or forgive.” Anything. I’d accept or forgive her anything without hesitation. That was a stupid question.

I loved her. Nothing she said, or did, could change that. But a relationship was two people. I could love her more than anything, but it could never work if she didn’t love me back. If she could even love me back.

Lottie sensed my mental distress and came to give me a hug.

“I’m here for you, William. Your heart is my heart. When you hurt, I hurt. I wish I could wave a wand and make this better for you.” I hugged her back and swallowed hard. “Love sucks, doesn’t it?”

Yes. It did.

Once again, I was jerking Will around. It made me feel awful, and I knew it made him feel awful, but I just couldn’t seem to stop. Whenever we got close to anything physical, I would absolutely freak out and put a stop to it.

Not because I didn’t want to be with Will. Oh, I definitely did. More than I’d admit. At night, when my mind would wander, I would imagine how it would be with him.

And then I would remember seeing Eddie again, something so unexpected that I was definitely still in shock about it.

When I’d closed that chapter in my life, I’d shoved him so far to the back of my mind that it was almost like he’d never existed.

I thought about telling Will. Imagining his reaction, wondering what he would say. How he would take it.

But those thoughts would just lead to me imagining the worst case scenario, where he stormed out and said he couldn’t deal with it, and then I’d lose him. But it wouldn’t just be Will. I’d lose Lottie and the rest of them, too. Above all, that was what I couldn’t let happen. So if that meant keeping my secret forever, that was what I’d do.

In an effort to get my mind to think about something else, I threw myself into my work. Before I’d met Lottie, and during my senior year of high school, homework was just about all I did. I’d done it before and I could do it again.

I spent most of my time at the library, hiding in a corner so no one could find me. Will and Lottie and everyone else would call or text and I’d ignore them. I claimed to be busy with classes, which was the truth. The only downside was the class I had with Lottie, because when I looked at her, the only thing I could see was Will. They shared so many features and sometimes she would make a face and all I could see was him making the exact same face. It made my heart twist in uncomfortable ways.