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Seeing my tepid silence, she forced a laugh and continued, “I’m kidding. I’m gonna work with my dad. He’s an advertising exec in New York. He commutes there every day, which is a real bi—” She looked at Henry, and self-corrected, “a real bummer. But it’s not a bad life.”
I whistled through my teeth. “You’d live in New York? Now that’s a big town.”
“You know what they say — the ol’ Giant Pear.”
I snorted. I knew I was getting interrogative, but I had so many questions for her. She was just so… so interesting. So full of future.
“You must like your dad, if you’d go work with him. Not all families can do that.”
“Yeah, I am. Close with him, that is. And my mom, and my siblings. We’re tight.” She stared off into the distance, a happy expression crossing her face.
“Siblings?”
“A little sister and little brother.”
“So you’ve always been the adult in the family, huh?”
She waggled her brows and grinned. “Guess I’m not the only psych student around here.”
“Oh, hardly, I’m just perceptive, that’s all.” I paused, then taking a bit of a risk, continued, “You did strike me as being… mature.”
“I am. Very.”
Her hands were glued to the tops of her thighs, rubbing them in circles, as if she were trying to dry them off. It made me wonder what it would be like to touch her, that bare, translucent skin that I’d seen earlier. Would it be downy? Silky? I imagined endless sensations at my fingertips.
“We’ve lived different lives, you and I.”
She jerked her head to Henry. “Yeah, I figured. But it’s still about the same stuff, right? Being with family, the ones you love?”
With a satisfied thunk, I dropped the hunk of meat onto a serving platter, and stuck a carving knife onto the plate.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Speaking of the ones you love,” she said, trying to make her words light and airy. “Can I ask where’s Henry’s mom?”
Dammit, we’d been having such a good time.
“She’s not in the picture,” I replied.
“Oh yeah?”
“Long story.”
She tilted her head down. “I like long stories. Those are the best kind.”
Why’d she have to push? Why’d she have to study me? I wasn’t a textbook to be cracked open and pored over. I resented the intrusion. This is what happens, my mind told me with a tinge of bitter exhaustion. What happens when you let people in. They want to know things about you.
Well, then, that was my error. I should’ve been putting up bigger walls, building more fences. I’d let my guard down for a moment, because Phoebe was so pretty, so wise. Fool me once…
“Carter?” she said. “You can tell me anything.”
“No. I really can’t.”
CHAPTER 9
Phoebe
OKAY, SO that hadn’t gone exactly the way I was hoping.
I’d known that Carter was closed, reserved, et cetera. I just didn’t realize what lengths he would go to protecting that quiet part of himself, the side he didn’t want people seeing.
He was already setting the table in the other room — I could hear the clatter of every knife dropping into place. A stormy mood, indeed. Henry had left to help him. I was, as ever, alone.
“Carter,” I called out, aiming to make some kind of peace. “The stove is still on, should I turn it off?”
In one second flat, he was back, turning off the stove with one hand and grabbing a towel with the other.
He stepped back, panting. The stovetop flames had disappeared. The kitchen was silent.
Dabbing his brow with the towel, he said, “You could’ve just turned it off.”
“Uh, yeah. Sorry. Thought maybe you were gonna, I dunno, cook something else.”
Carter looked a special breed of pissed, but all he replied was, “Henry could’ve gotten hurt.”
“Henry’s in the other room. And it’s just a stove. Relax.”
He turned on a heel, and walked back from whence he came. “Relax,” he muttered with a laugh under his breath, a sound not meant for my ears. “Sure thing.”
Okay, that was weird, right? Jo-Beth wasn’t around, so I had nobody to run it by, but I was pretty sure that constituted full-blown weird. I recognized the defensive behaviors that came up when I tried to talk about Henry’s mom — deflecting, shutting down, the usual. Didn’t make it any less unusual, but still basically normal stuff.
Maybe he had a messy divorce, or she’d died, or some other Dickensian thing. Worse yet, maybe they were still technically married or taking a break. Could that be why he was so reluctant to be around me, as if I were both enticing and revolting? Getting involved with a married man sounded like a fun way to ruin my life.
Focus, Phoebe, my mind reminded me. And she — I — was right because the only thing stranger than his reaction to my questions had been the whole stove thing. I mean, stoves are stoves. That reaction was not proportionate to the problem.
