Tempted. Megan Hart

which was good. He wasn’t so great about taking blame, which wasn’t.

      “So tell me what they did that was so bad, then.”

      Molly rinsed and wrung one of the dishcloths and proceeded to wipe down the center island, though I’d already done it. This annoyed me much less from her than it would have from her mother, who’d have been doing it deliberately. Molly simply had been conditioned to following after someone else’s efforts and straightening the edges—even if they weren’t untidy.

      “Alex doesn’t come from a very good family.”

      I didn’t comment. If you want to know how someone really feels, you almost never have to ask. Molly swiped at invisible spots with her cloth.

      “They’re white trash, to be perfectly honest. His sisters were sluts. One or two of them got pregnant in high school. His mom and dad are drunks. They’re all low-class.”

      I don’t think I flinched at her judgment of Alex’s family. She wasn’t talking about my sisters, or my parents. Or about me.

      I wanted to tell her that she was lucky nobody judged her based upon how her parents acted, but I kept that opinion to myself, too. “There must have been something good about him for James to be his friend, Molly. And we aren’t always what our parents are.”

      She shrugged. There was more she wanted to tell. I saw it in her eyes. “He smoked and drank, and more than cigarettes, if you know what I mean.”

      “Lots of kids do that, Molly, even the so-called good ones.”

      “He wore eyeliner.”

      My eyebrows rose, both at once. There it was. The worst of it. Worse, somehow, than the drinking or the weed smoking, or even the fact his family was white trash. This was the real reason they hadn’t liked Alex Kennedy, and didn’t like him now.

      “… eyeliner.” I couldn’t help saying it like it was ridiculous, because … well … it was.

      “Yes,” she hissed, glancing again to the deck. “Black eyeliner. And … sometimes …”

      I waited while she struggled with whether or not she could possibly bring herself to continue.

      “Lip gloss,” she said. “And he dyed his hair black and wore it spiked out all over, and he wore high-collared shirts with pins at the throat and suit jackets ….”

      I could picture him, a Robert Smith wannabe, or like Ducky from Pretty in Pink. “Oh, Molly. So did lots of people. It was the 80s.”

      She shrugged again. Nothing I could say would change her mind. “James didn’t. Not until he started hanging out with Alex.”

      I’d seen pictures of James from that time. He’d been scrawny and gangly, a hodgepodge of stripes and plaids and battered Converse sneakers. I hadn’t noticed any liner or gloss but could easily imagine him wearing it. It would have set off his vivid blue eyes quite nicely, I thought.

      “Anyway,” Molly said. “He doesn’t seem to have changed much.”

      “I’ll keep an eye on my makeup bag.”

      This time, she didn’t miss the veiled sarcasm. “I’m just telling you, Anne, Alex was bad news then, and he’s probably no better now. That’s all. Do with it what you want.”

      “Thanks.” I didn’t want to do anything with it. The more they all hated Alex, the better I felt I wanted to like him. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

      “We were all really glad when James didn’t hang out with him anymore,” she added, unprompted, and I looked up at her again.

      “I know they had a fight.”

      If you want someone to tell you something they really want to say, all you have to do is let them.

      But however much Molly might want to say about it, she couldn’t. “Yes. I know. James never said what it was about. Just that Alex had come to visit him in college—Alex didn’t go to college, you know.”

      It hadn’t seemed to hurt him at all. I didn’t comment on that, either.

      “Anyway, he went to Ohio State to visit James and something happened, and they had a big fight. James came home for a week. A week! And then he went back to school and we never found out what had happened.”

      I couldn’t stop the smug smile wanting to creep over my mouth, so I hid it by loading some containers into the refrigerator. That was even worse than the eyeliner. That James had dared not to share every intimate detail of his life with them. That he had something they didn’t know.

      A secret.

      Of course, he had it from me, too.

       Chapter 04

      I went to bed before the men did, and James woke me when he slid in beside me. He gave me a nudge or two, but I feigned sleep and soon his snoring buzzed over me. I’d been sleeping more peacefully before he came to bed, but now I lay awake listening to the noises all houses make in the night. The same creaks and groans, the ticking of an extra-loud clock. But tonight, something unfamiliar. The shuffle of feet in the hall, the flush of a toilet and thud of a door closing. Then the sound of sleeping again, the air heavy with it, and I let James pull me closer, until I fell back to sleep in his arms.

      He was up and gone in the morning before I woke. I lay in bed for a while, stretching and thinking, until the need for the bathroom forced me up and about. Alex was out on the deck already, a mug of coffee in one hand. His eyes swept the lake and back as a morning breeze ruffled the fringes of hair falling too long over his forehead. I painted an image of mid-80s high fashion on him with my mind, and it made me smile.

      “Good morning. I thought you might still be asleep.” I joined him as I sipped my own coffee. It was good. Better than I made it.

      I was getting used to his languid looks. I was getting used to him. His mouth tilted.

      “I’m all messed up from traveling. Time zones, jet lag. Besides, early bird and all that.”

      He gave me a grin so easy I had no choice but to return it. Side by side we leaned on the railing and looked out over the water. I didn’t feel like he expected me to say anything, and he didn’t, either. It was nice.

      When he’d finished his coffee, he lifted the empty mug. “So. It’s just you and me today.”

      I nodded. I wasn’t as worried about it as I’d have been the day before. Funny how being warned away from him made me feel that much more comfortable. “Yep.”

      He looked back out over the water. “Do you guys still have the Skeeter?”

      The Skeeter was the little sailboat belonging to James’s grandparents. “Sure.”

      “Want to take her out? We could sail across to the marina, hit the park, grab some lunch at Bay Harbor—be tourists for a day. My treat. What do you say? I haven’t been on a roller coaster in about a hundred years.”

      “I don’t know how to sail.”

      “Anne.” The look dipped down, one brow raised, his smile half a leer. “I do.”

      “I don’t really like sailing ….” His look, that seductive, pleading, half-pouting look, stopped me.

      “You don’t like sailing?” He looked over the water again. “You live on a lake, and you don’t like sailing.”

      It did sound dumb. “No.”

      “You get seasick?”

      “No.”

      “You can’t swim?”

      “I can swim.”

      We studied each other. I think he was waiting for me to tell him what I really wanted to say, but there wasn’t anything I wanted to share.