Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Walker was impatient to get back to her, which was ridiculous.
He’d spent the night in his office again.
The idea of sharing a bed just felt... it didn’t feel like a good idea.
He decided that he wasn’t going to do that.
But he also wasn’t going to kick her out of his room.
Obviously, he could go sleep in her space, but his office was fine.
Then, though, in the morning, he had stuff that he had to go out and do, and what he really wanted was to spend the day with Addison.
Last night had been unexpected. He hadn’t really meant to spill his guts to her.
Hadn’t meant to catch all of the guts she’d spilled in return, but, lo, he had.
He had never talked about all the shoplifting stuff.
Even he and Cody didn’t talk about it. They both knew they’d done it.
They’d tried to shield Lila from that. Tried to make her feel like their childhood was an endless adventure.
That they were Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, not just wayward youths with nobody looking out for them.
He had been honest with her when he’d said discovering that being a bit of a con man was a natural, inborn skill set for him had been jarring. Had been enraging, even.
He had a gift for lying. And making the lie sound sweet.
Now that he knew where it came from, he hated it.
She was right, though, it had been a bit of an advantage for him. Kept them alive.
But what he didn’t like was the arrogance that he’d felt while doing it. The way he’d felt like he was outmaneuvering people, being smarter than them. He had been an angry kid, and that had been the shape it had taken.
He was angry now, honestly. He just didn’t like to think of it that way.
But he’d said that to her as well. That he used his anger. That he let it fuel him.
Boy, did he.
Now he was mad that he’d told his brother they would come over for a barbecue, because he just wanted to stay home and have her again. And that precious little bit of evening time before he left her sleeping alone in bed.
If you actually slept with her, you’d get a bit more time with her.
It was true.
But still, that felt like one intimacy too many, and he didn’t want to go there. He preferred his space. Especially when he was sleeping.
When he got back to the house just in time to take her to his brother’s, she was waiting for him, wearing a demure floral dress that fell past her knees, flowing, loose and pretty like the kind of thing she had worn before she had embarked on the revenge outfit campaign.
But what surprised him the most was that she looked nervous.
“What’s up with you?” he asked as he opened the passenger door for her, then rounded to the driver’s side and let himself in.
“I don’t really know your family. And I imagine that the things they’ve heard about me are not very flattering.”
“The things they’ve heard about you? You mean the things they overheard while we were planning your wedding?”
He knew that he shouldn’t tease her about that. But she just didn’t seem heartbroken about that guy, so it felt more like he was teasing her about an external inconvenience than an actual heartbreak.
“So.”
“Well, that too. You know, I just kept waiting for you to say no,” she said, looking out the passenger side window.
“To what?”
“Any of my demands. I think secretly what I wanted was for it to flip a switch inside of me, and then I could just call the wedding off. Could take it as a sign that things weren’t going to be perfect, and if they weren’t going to be perfect, then we had to postpone.
Or cancel. I think I really wanted an excuse to stop it.
And that made me horrible, and I’m sorry.
It made me act more like I did back in high school, and believe me, other than that, I haven’t really acted that way. ”
It made sense. But of course he’d been dedicated to not seeing her as an actual human so he’d assumed she was just being the Addison he knew in high school. Of course he’d never stopped to ask why Addison in high school had been the way she was, much less why she was the way she was now.
“It’s basically the coping strategy that I know.
” She wrinkled her nose. “Use that rich bitch attitude to distance people, to get what I want, or to create a situation that I want secretly. It’s like the only tool in my tool bag.
And I hate it. I don’t want to do it anymore.
I don’t want to be in a position where I have to do that.
I want to be able to sit down and be honest with myself.
Ask myself what I really, really want. Even if it’s messy. I’ve been so scared of being messy.”
“Well, you’re hanging with the Graysons now. Messy is what we do. That I can promise you.”
He almost felt bad, flinging her into the deep end of his family. Because that was a whole thing. Of that everyone could be certain.
It didn’t take long to get to his brother’s house, and he went ahead and pulled around the back, where he knew everyone would already be, because they were going to be a few minutes late.
When he arrived, the whole family was seated at a long table in the backyard, all the food piled up at the center. And as soon as his truck pulled up, everyone there turned to look.
Today there were Cara, Zane, Marlowe and Cody, Lila, Nolan. Also Pike, one of the ranch hands who, frankly, sort of irritated Walker, mainly because he was always trying to outspin Walker’s yarns.
He was one of those guys that held the room captive with his stories and verbal sleight of hand, and Walker could say that, quite honestly, as much as he liked Pike, he didn’t exactly trust him, because he was a little bit too much like Walker for Walker’s taste.
Still, it was a decent crowd of folks, and some of them needed to believe that this relationship was real, so when he got out of the truck, he went over to Addison’s side, opened the door and took her hand.
Lila knew that the relationship wasn’t real, and still, her eyes flicked down to where their hands were joined, back up to Walker, and she lifted her eyebrows.
He shrugged at her in response.
I’m a charming motherfucker, Lila, he said internally.
His sister rolled her eyes, almost like she could read his mind.
He could see Addison smiling, this smile that kept getting wider and wider. And he could practically see gears turning in her brain. Like she was figuring out how to approach this. He could see the exact moment she had decided to approach it like a campaign event.
“Hi, everyone,” she said brightly as she took a seat without waiting for Walker to guide her. “Thank you so much for inviting me over to dinner.”
“Of course,” Cody and Marlowe said at the same time.
“It really has been quite the time. But I can honestly say that the Painted Ridge Resort is the only thing that has made it bearable. I owe you a debt of gratitude.”
He felt like there were campaign promises underlying that.
It was funny to realize how much he and Addison were alike.
He had always considered them to be opposites, and he had a feeling she had too. But here she was, using that same charm that he knew was more defensive than it was real.
She hid behind this shell, the shell that he had always imagined was the real deal.
It wasn’t. It was all anxiety and defensive wounds.
He hadn’t expected that.
But she was a much more interesting person than he had ever given her credit for. Maybe she would say the same about him.
They both did a lot to make people assume that they were shallow waters that weren’t worth taking a deep look into.
Hell.
Just hell.
“Yeah, sorry about everything,” Cody said. “But honestly, we owe you. The increase in our business has been exponential. And I really hate that we’re profiting off of something that traumatic for you.”
Addison laughed. “Honestly, I’m fine. Walker and I are having a great time, and Alan was the wrong man for me. I think I needed this to happen in order for me to see that.”
She was good. Didn’t put a label on the two of them, which anyone at the table who wasn’t in the know about what they were doing wouldn’t have believed anyway, and brushed Alan off like the tertiary character that he was.
Not worthy of thinking about too deeply.
No speculation on his motives, no concern about what he was doing, no sign of regret.
“Well, that’s good,” Marlowe said. “I can tell you firsthand what happens when you marry the wrong guy. It’s bad.”
“Spoiler alert!” Lila said. “I haven’t had my mistake marriage yet.”
“And may you never have that,” Cody said. “Because I’ve made it this far without committing any murders, and I don’t want to have to do it now.”
“Oh, please,” Lila said. “I can commit my own murders. I’ve got a pre-dug hole, and a bag of lime. I’m not afraid to dissolve my own corpses.”
“You are terrifying,” Walker said.
“I am what you made me.”
She was teasing, and he knew that. But given that he had just been excavating his childhood, that made him feel just a little bit regretful. Lila was what they had made her. They had done their best. She was fearsome and feral, and maybe that was a good thing. She was tough, anyway.
She was also happy. He wasn’t sure that she’d ever had the sense of how much peril they were in.
Nolan had known, of course. He had hung around quite a bit, because there was strength in numbers, and he was otherwise by himself. Lived with a grandmother who never looked twice at him, and often came over while she was watching soap operas during the day, or rather napping in front of them.
His clothes always smelled of cigarette smoke, the whole apartment was permeated with it.
They started letting him keep clothes over at their place, so he could change for school. Have some things that didn’t have that permanent nicotine imprint on them.
They had done their best for each other. They had always done their best, it was just that it hadn’t been good enough to get any of them out of it without some trauma.