Page 10 of Lies and Lullabies
My whole body went cold. “What?”
“You heard me, Jonas. They went into the store together. And then your girl turned her car around and passed us.”
The earth lurched beneath me. “She wasn’t wearing any rings,” I said stupidly. It was the first thing I’d checked when I walked out onto the dock.
“Not everybody likes jewelry, Jonas.” She said it in a perfectly gentle voice, but it shredded my heart anyway. Because she was right. And Kira didn’t go out for bling. She was beautiful in a completely natural, unadorned way.
Fuck.
Chewing on this revelation, I paddled the canoe back across the lake in silence until the front of the lodge came into view. So did Ethan and Nix. My guitar player was lying in a hammock in front of the lodge, and Ethan was doing some pushups on the lawn.
But I didn’t even greet them. I shoved the canoe onto the bank and went inside, looking for someplace to think. I’d rented out the whole place for the weekend, so nobody would bother us. Poking my head into a couple of rooms, I found my luggage beside a quaint double bed. I shut the bedroom door and dropped myself onto the quilt.
Someone—probably Ethan—had opened the windows already, so sounds of my friends’ voices drifted in. The afternoon ticked by slowly. Tomorrow I’d be able to see Kira again. But tomorrow seemed like a long way away. As the light began to fade, the voices on the deck grew louder and more raucous. The smell of burgers on the grill eventually wafted through the window, but I did not get up to join the others.
My mind was too full of memories of that other summer—the one when I’d pulled myself together. All day I’d worked on songwriting, pausing only for Mrs. Wetzle’s lousy lunch offerings and a quick dip in the lake. Then, feeling good about myself, I’d eaten some of Kira’s excellent cooking, and smiled across the table at her for a couple of hours over a beer or four.
I’d kept my head down, filling the pages of my notebooks with lyrics and chord progressions. My phone remained powered down and stashed in a drawer. No producer nagged me, and there were no conference calls with the record label. I grew the most outrageously ugly beard, and didn’t get a haircut all summer. By Labor Day weekend, I’d been shaggier than I’d ever looked in my life, but I’d felt so much better about myself that it wasn’t even funny.
On the second-to-last night I was in Maine, Kira asked me if I wanted to go to the county fair. “Sure,” I’d answered. I would have followed her anywhere.
Preserving my last moments of anonymity with a baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, I went to the fair with Kira in her father’s car. The whole evening was silly and glorious. First I talked Kira onto the Himalayan ride. And as it spun us senseless, I held Kira’s wrist in a death grip. She just laughed and threw her head back, thrilled with the motion.
Then, as the sun set, we ate corn dogs and caramel apples. We attempted to pop balloons with darts. I was a terrible shot, but after a dozen tries, and probably fifty bucks, I won a purple stuffed cat. We laughed at how ugly it was, but Kira tucked it under her arm anyway, and we got in line for the Ferris wheel. The queue inched forward as couples boarded.
“How about that view?” I joked when we were finally aloft.
“It’s killer,” Kira whispered from her side of our little metal bench. In the daylight, we could have seen for miles. But Maine was so rural that all we could see beyond the fairgrounds was the blackness of distant valleys and lakes.
Perhaps it was the novelty of seeing Kira away from the general store. But as we went whirling through the night air, hip to hip, I felt a new kind of electricity between us. Turning, I studied Kira’s wide-eyed profile. And it suddenly became very difficult not to kiss her. I’d be leaving in less than thirty-six hours, and I wasn’t happy about it at all.
Do it, my subconscious begged.You know you want to. I was pretty sure that she wouldn’t mind at all. The way she held my gaze a little too long when we laughed, and the way she blushed when I complimented her? Those were signs. Reading girls was one of my talents.
Somehow I had resisted, held our attraction at bay. But just when I was complimenting myself on my self-control, she opened her mouth and broke my heart.
“John?” she said softly. “I just want to tell you that hanging around with you this summer was a great help to me.”
“Yeah?” I croaked.
“This year was really terrible, and you helped me forget about it. You took me out of my own head. Because you…”
“I what?”
“It’s too weird. Too hard to say out loud.”
“Well, now I’m desperately curious. But no biggie.”
She’d laughed, but it held a nervous edge. “Okay, fine. I needed to have a guy friend, one who didn’t hit on me. Because…” She swallowed. “Last year. It wasn’t my pocketbook that was stolen that night in that parking lot.”
My body went cold, and I stared at her for two beats of my heart. “Kira, are you trying to tell me that you were…”
She nodded, eyes wet. The lights from the Ferris wheel were reflected in her tears. “See? You can’t even say the word.”
“Forced?”
“Raped,” she said, her voice flat.
“Come here.” I’d spent the summer trying not to touch her, but now I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her against my body. There was nothing sexual about it. I buried my nose in her hair. “I’m so sorry, sweetness.” I tipped her head to rest on my shoulder and took a shaky breath. “Goddamn it, Kira. I would do anything to make that not be true.”
