Chapter Seventeen
“B ow chicka wow wow,” I hummed to myself as I swiped the leather wipes over the boot. I started at the toes and slowly worked my way up to the thighs. Conscious of Liam’s gaze upon me, my heart beat triple time and as smooth as I was trying to be, my movements felt clumsy and awkward.
Okay, so stripper moves are not as intuitive as one would think. I tried to wiggle my hips but the tiny toothpick heels holding me up didn’t accommodate the shift in weight as easily as one would expect. I bobbled, I wobbled, and I hoped he was too far away to see me grab the back of a chair to keep from face planting.
No, no, no, not again. Seriously, I could not make an ass of myself again twice in one night.
With my confidence squashed, I went back to just casually cleaning the boots. I could still see his reflection in the mirror, and I figured maybe now was the time to lose the boots. I reclined on the window seat and lifted one leg. I worked the zipper down all the way to the sole and then toed off the boot. A glance at the vase showed that he was still there. His arms were no longer crossed over his chest but had dropped to his sides. I envisioned his fists clenching and unclenching. The thought of making him crazy made me all kinds of naughty girl giddy.
I slowly lifted my other leg and hummed my stripper music again. I pulled the zipper down, slowly, painfully slowly, seriously, my fingers started to cramp, until I was able to wriggle my foot out of the boot, which I dropped on the ground. His reflection was still visible, and I wondered if I should go for broke and lose my sweater or the leggings. I was just reaching for my waistband when Em blew into the kitchen.
“Oh, my god, do not tell me you are about to strip in our kitchen for that man!” my little sister cried.
Em pointed right at Liam’s window, and I shifted his direction as if I’d been unaware he’d been there. Our gazes locked and one of his eyebrows rose ever so slightly as if daring me. Without hesitation I reached for the hem of my sweater.
“Oh, hell no!” Em snapped off the light, plunging us into darkness.
“But—” I protested.
“No,” she said. “Come here.”
Emily headed out of the kitchen and into the dimly lit hallway where Liam wouldn’t be able to see us. I picked up the boots and followed.
“You are out of control,” baby sis lectured. “You need to get a grip. Where’s your self-respect?”
“I still have it, some of it anyway,” I said. “I mean I’m not over there groveling for him to come back to me. I’m just trying to stay on his radar, so he’ll realize that we belong to—hold up! Wait one mother-fluffing minute, what did you do to your hair?”
“What?” Em’s eyes were wide with innocence. “Nothing. It must be the lighting.”
“That is not lighting,” I said.
I grabbed her hand and dragged her into the living room. Under better light, I could see dark blue and teal streaks running through her hair from the crown to the tips. It looked awesome. It looked badass. Except it was on Em, and Em didn’t do awesome or badass. Em did cute and nice and sweet.
“Your hair is blue,” I said.
“Really?” she asked as if mildly surprised. “Huh.”
“What...why...ugh,” I paused and tried to get my thoughts together. “Em, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” my sister said. “Shaking things up a bit, you know, trying to get my feet back under me.”
“With blue hair?” I asked.
“No, this was just something fun to do.” The joy of a new hairstyle didn’t exude from Em’s demeanor. Did she hate it? Love it? Regret it?
“Soph is going to freak.” I noticed that her skin was pale, and she was thinner too.
“Why? It’s not her hair.”
“Good point.”
Em took the boots out of my arms and headed toward the stairs. She was dressed casually in jeans and slip on sneakers with a thermal shirt. Maybe that’s what a person wore to the salon when they dyed their hair blue. I had no idea. I just wasn’t buying what she was peddling. She could pretend she was fine all she wanted, but the shdows beneath her eyes were getting darker every day, which the blue hair did not help. This was not a person who was dealing with her stuff.
“Em, grief can be really difficult to navigate,” I said. “I hope you know you can talk to me about anything anytime. You do know that, right?”
“Yeah, I know.” Em shrugged, jostling her armful of boot. “But I don’t need to. I’m fine.”
“Fine is usually code for not fine,” I pressed.
“Well, this time it isn’t. Fine is fine,” she said. “And now I’m going to bed. Good night.”
“Good night,” I called after her.
“And do not go back and finish your striptease in the kitchen,” Em called over her shoulder.
“I wasn’t going to,” I lied.
She snorted and I knew she didn’t believe me because she was smart like that. With a last regretful glance toward Liam’s house, I checked the locks and secured the first floor before climbing the stairs to my bedroom.
The light across the way had gone dark and I didn’t bother putting on mine while I changed, sensing that he would not be looking for me again tonight. Maybe Em was right. I might be sacrificing my self-respect for a lost cause. Was Liam worth it? Yes, definitely yes. If I could have a second chance at what we’d once had, I would give up the above and throw in my pride and dignity, too.
It occurred to me as I slipped between the sheets that maybe Soph was also right, and that chasing Liam was my own thigh-high-boots-and-blue-hair way of dealing with my grief and shock.
Perhaps pursuing him was more about having a distraction than a mission. Maybe I didn’t want Liam as much as I wanted to not think about the fact that I wasn’t who I thought I was. That all the years of criticism and scrutiny weren’t about me so much as they were about Babs’s rage at my father’s betrayal. I wished she had told me. I wished we’d gotten therapy or something, but mostly, I wished she’d given me a chance to love her and mourn her the way Em and Soph were. I never had and never would. The hurt ambushed me and before I knew it, I was rolling onto my pillow and sobbing until the pain ebbed and I could breathe again.
Ambush grief. One minute you were fine and the next you were a mess. It had hit me several times over the past few days, but usually, I redirected my thoughts to Liam and pushed it away. This time I didn’t. I let myself grieve for the woman I had thought was my mother and for the relationship we could have had that was now lost to me for good.
I let the sadness, the bitterness, the wish that it could have been different, fill me up inside. It spilled over my rim and splashed down my sides. It seemed unending, and I thought about distracting myself from the anguish with thoughts of Liam, but I didn’t. Instead, I concentrated on Babs. I thought about how she’d said she wished she could have loved me. Then I thought about Mrs. G and how she’d said Babs was so proud of me. The pain in my chest eased. It would have to be enough.
I realized it was time for some self-truth. I didn’t want to believe that I was using Liam to manage my grief, but I couldn’t deny that my interest in him had become much more focused after Babs’s death and after learning the truth of my own origins.
Oh, sure, I’d thought he was a hottie before she died and we clearly had unfinished business, but in the days leading up to her death and after, it became a mission to get him to notice me, to give us another chance.
Why was I suddenly so desperate to revisit a relationship I had left years before without a backward glance? It wasn’t coincidental. I was running away from my grief or trying to, anyway. With my new awareness, I knew I needed to step back, to reevaluate, and reassess.
If I was chasing Liam for the wrong reasons, things weren’t going to work out for us. I refused to be responsible for ruining his current relationship if I was uncertain that us being together was the outcome that I truly wanted. It wasn’t fair to any of us, and I knew what I had to do.
Em had split before I got up the next day. Since she still wasn’t working, I had no idea where she could be, and I was more worried about her than ever. Given how close they had been, losing Babs had to be an emotionally crushing weight that she couldn’t lift alone. I wished I knew how to get her to talk to me.
Soph wasn’t home either, as she was volunteering at the twins’ school, so I left her a message about Em’s blue hair but didn’t hear back from her all morning. I drank my coffee in the kitchen, feeling more than a little mortified to think of how far I would have gone if Em hadn’t crashed my little striptease the night before.
In an effort to step back and do some thinking, I didn’t go surfing or to the coffee shop. The shade over my bedroom window remained down and I worked all day, not breaking to loiter in the front yard to sunbathe, or anything else for that matter.
Instead, I chugged endless cups of coffee until I was so wired, I was certain I could smell sounds. It was late afternoon with my heart hammering and my fingers shaking, I finally backed away from my laptop and pulled on some jogging gear. I gulped a big bottle of water and then stretched. I would run my demons out of my head or at the very least speed walk them into silence.
Shoving earbuds into my ears, I cranked Guns N’ Roses’s Appetite for Destruction from the phone in my arm holster and began to jog. In my sports bra and yoga pants, I started down the street and through Gull’s Harbor to the narrow strip of pavement that had been created specifically for people who wanted to run or walk along the tops of the cliffs with an ocean view.
The ripping crunch and grind of the guitar along with the singer’s raw vocals blanketed my senses to any other sounds. I kept my head forward and ran, clocking the miles as if they were no big deal. I knew I needed to save enough strength to turn around and go back so at a small park on the rise of a grassy hill, I paused.
Sweat was pouring off me. My lungs heaved as I sucked in gulps of the damp salt air. I lifted my face to the strong, cool breeze blowing in from the ocean and let it chill my skin. I shut off the music and closed my eyes. I did some yoga breathing and tried to feel my feet sink into the earth as I became one with my surroundings. A seagull flew by, cawing at me as if trying to pull me out of my Zen moment, but I refused to budge.
The sound of a motorcycle roared by, still, I maintained my calm. I was standing just off the path so as not to be in the way of any other joggers. The motorcycle’s engine revved again. I huffed a breath and concentrated on my breathing. In with the good air and out with the bad, yada, yada, yada. The engine growled one more time and this time, I lost my patience.
I whipped my head around prepared to give the motorcyclist a blast of stink eye that would overheat his engine, but when my gaze met the motorcyclist’s, it was my engine that boiled over. Liam, in a leather jacket astride a big behemoth of a ride, was staring at me as if he couldn’t decide whether to push me off the cliff or kidnap me.
Liam switched off the engine and rolled the bike onto its stand—he swung his leg over the seat and strode toward me. His intense brown gaze made me want to run. I just couldn’t decide if it should be to him or away. So, like a moron I stood frozen, watching him approach with a titillated horrified fascination that I was certain made me look as if I had the shallowest brain pan in existence.
I expected him to stop a few feet away or at the very least on the edge of my personal space. He didn’t. He cruised right up until he was flush against me with one hand clutching my hip while the other gripped the back of my head. His lips landed on mine with the same force of a rolling wave crashing on the beach. His mouth fit perfectly against mine and he made love to my lips just like he had to my body the other night. Oh, wow.
Every bit of me wanted to wrap myself around him and return his kiss measure for measure, but I stood frozen, uncertain what to do. I had promised myself I would step back and figure it out but the only thing I had figured out was that despite my best intentions, I had spent all day missing him, thinking about him, and wanting him. Was it because he was the love of my life or because I was channeling my grief into the beautiful chemistry between us that simply would not fade?
As quickly as Liam grabbed me, he released me except that he kept his hand on my hip, as if to reassure himself that he could stop me if I ran.
I wasn’t running anywhere. Instead, in a perfect moment of clarity, I realized that my feelings for Liam had nothing to do with Babs passing or the revelation that she wasn’t my mother. I didn’t want him more because I was trying to escape my grief but rather, I wanted him because now that Babs was gone so was one of the biggest obstacles to our being together. Maybe when Babs had said she’d wished she had more time to make it right, she had meant this, Liam and me together, finally.
His gaze moved over my face as if he was trying to figure out what I was thinking. I couldn’t find the words, so instead I rose on my toes, looped my arms around his neck, and pulled him in for another kiss. I wasn’t tentative or gentle, rather it was my turn to claim and possess and to let him know quite plainly that I considered him mine.
He pulled me in tight and kissed me back, making it clear that he felt the same way. He tipped my head and kissed my jaw just below my ear, working his way down my neck as I clung to him.
“Surfer girl, you are driving me crazy,” he said. “I can’t fight this anymore. Come home with me.”
“Okay,” I said.