When Sebastian moved back to Walls of Water to take over old Dr. Kostovo’s dental practice last year, he’d also bought Dr. Kostovo’s house, because Dr. K was retiring to Nevada to get away from the moist Walls of Water air that bothered his arthritis. It was a dark stone house with a decorative stone turret. It was called Shade Tree Cottage, and Sebastian once told Paxton that he liked the drama of the place, that he liked to pretend he was living in an episode of Dark Shadows.
She knocked on his door. Moments later, Sebastian opened it. “Hello, beautiful,” he said, and opened the door farther for her to enter. “I didn’t expect to see you tonight.”
“I just wanted to say hi,” she said as she walked in, and the words sounded lame, even to her, as if there necessarily had to be an excuse, even though she knew he didn’t mind her stopping by.
She walked to the living room and sat on the couch, where he’d obviously been watching television. Judging by the outside, one would expect swords and coats of arms on the walls inside, but Sebastian had instead made the interior light and comfortable. He had moved back not long after she’d decided against buying the townhouse, and she’d enjoyed watching this place turn into his own. She even secretly envied his independence sometimes. She took off her shoes and tucked her feet under her as Sebastian sat beside her and crossed his legs at the knees. He was wearing drawstring pants and a T-shirt. His feet were bare, his toenails neatly trimmed.
Sebastian was a beautiful man, his face as delicate as a John Donne poem. Everyone presumed he was gay, but no one really knew for sure. He neither confirmed nor denied it, not in high school, and not now. Paxton was fairly certain, though, that she was the only person here to have ever seen proof. In high school he’d been thin and fair, wore eyeliner and long coats, and carried a satchel when everyone else in school had L.L.Bean backpacks. He’d been hard to miss. That’s why he’d caught her eye in the Asheville Mall their senior year. Asheville was about an hour outside of Walls of Water, and Paxton and her friends went there nearly every Saturday. Sebastian had been in the food court with at least a half-dozen other flamboyant teenage boys, boys not from Walls of Water. This was a different crowd, one not seen in small towns. She and her friends had been walking by when she’d spotted him. Suddenly, one of the exotic boys with black spiky hair and elbow-length black-and-white fingerless gloves leaned over the table and kissed Sebastian full on the mouth, deeply. At some point during the kiss, Sebastian had opened his eyes and seen her. Still kissing the boy, his eyes followed her as she’d walked away. She couldn’t remember ever seeing something as bold and seductive.
Thinking back to that kiss, it seemed so unlike him now. He was very controlled these days, almost asexual in the sharply tailored suits he wore to work, complete with silk ties so smooth they caught light.
“How was your day?” he asked, propping his elbow on the back of the couch, so close he almost touched her.
“Okay, I guess.” She reached over and lifted his half-empty wineglass from the coffee table and took a sip.
He tilted his head. “Just okay?”
“The bright spot was that Colin got here earlier than expected. The landscaping at the Madam is going to be done on time for sure now. But the club meeting tonight was so odd. I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s still so much to do for the gala, and suddenly everyone seems distracted.”
“How so?”
She paused, thinking about it. “Whenever I would get too nosy as a child, my grandmother would say, When you learn someone else’s secret, your own secrets aren’t safe. Dig up one, release them all. That’s what the meeting was like. Everyone was admitting things, secret things. And once they started, it was like they couldn’t stop.”
He smiled. “I’m confused. Isn’t that what the meetings are all about? Gossip?”
“Not like this,” she said. “Trust me.”
“Then do tell,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “What secrets have the society ladies been keeping? What’s your secret?”
Paxton tried to laugh, but it made her head hurt. She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t have secrets.”
He kept his eyebrows raised.
She had to admit to something now. But definitely not what she’d almost admitted at the meeting. “I’m dreading telling my grandmother about the gala. I promised my mother I would do it tomorrow morning, but I don’t want to. I really, really don’t want to. And I feel terrible about it. Nana Osgood helped found the club. It was wrong to keep this from her for so long. But she’s just so …”
Sebastian nodded. He knew. “Do you want me to go with you?”
“No. She treats you horribly.” Ever since she and Sebastian had started spending their Sundays together—something she looked forward to all week, like counting down the days to Christmas—he’d been coming with her to her weekly visits with her grandmother on Sunday evenings. She wasn’t going to make him come with her on a weekday, too. That was too much to ask of anyone.
“She treats everyone horribly, darling.” He reached over and took the wineglass from her and set it down, then took her hand in his. “Let go of that tightfisted control. You don’t have to do everything yourself.” He looked her in the eye and said, “I’ll go with you to see your grandmother tomorrow.”
“Really?”
“You know I’d do anything for you.”
She put his hand to her warm cheek and closed her eyes. His skin was cool and soft. He’d once told her that if she washed her hands as many times as he did in a day, moisturizer would become her best friend, too.
She realized what she was doing, and her eyes flew open. She let go of his hand and stood, fumbling with her shoes. “I should go,” she said, while trying to wedge her feet back into her strappy heels. “Thanks for letting me vent.”
“You’re such a ball of energy. Do you actually sleep?”
She gave him a weak smile. “Occasionally.”
He slowly uncrossed his legs, watching her thoughtfully as he stood. The moment they’d met again when he’d moved back, just by chance after her book club meeting at Hartley’s Tea Room last year, Paxton had felt a sting she’d been completely unprepared for, like a shock of electricity. She hadn’t recognized him at first, she’d known only that he was staggeringly beautiful, almost otherworldly, and she’d wondered what he was doing in Walls of Water. She had resolved to call around and find out who he was as she’d unlocked her car door, still staring at him as he’d walked to his car, parked a few spaces down. He’d opened his door and tossed the bag he’d been carrying from the Slightly Foxed Bookstore inside, then he’d turned to see her staring at him. He’d stared back, then smiled slightly and said, “Hello, Paxton,” which had blown her to pieces. He’d had to remind her that they had gone to school together. They’d ended up back in Hartley’s Tea Room, talking for hours. By the time they’d parted ways that afternoon, she’d been done for. And the reality of it would still catch her off guard. No matter how many times she told herself that nothing good could come of this, that she was just setting herself up, she couldn’t seem to help her feelings for him.
“Good night, lovely,” he said. He reached out and petted her hair almost apologetically. And that’s when it hit her so hard it made her chest hurt. He knew.
Appalled, she turned to the door. How long had he known? All along? Or had she done something recently to make him suspect? My God, what an awful night this had turned out to be. It felt like the universe was playing tricks.
“Pax? What’s wrong?” he asked, following her.
“Nothing. I’m fine. I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” she tried to say brightly as she walked outside into a cloak of humid darkness.
And she could have sworn she heard the whisper of someone’s laughter.
THREE
Code of Outcasts
Willa heard the knock at her door just as she was taking the last load out of the dryer that evening. She had a feeling she knew who it was, but with all her windows closed and the
air conditioner on, she’d thought her prickly neighbors wouldn’t be able to hear it when she’d cranked up Bruce Springsteen.
She set the load of clothes on her kitchen table, skipping her usual ritual of burying her face in the warm laundry, and walked through the shotgun-style house to the front door.
This was one of the drawbacks to living in an old neighborhood with houses so close together. But Willa had inherited this, her childhood home, when her father had passed away almost seven years ago. A mortgage-free house was nothing to sneeze at, especially considering she had finally paid off the astronomical credit card debt she’d acquired in college. Walls of Water had an unusually high number per capita of wealthy residents, and when she was younger she used to hate not being one of them. It had been a heady feeling to suddenly have such easy access to cash in college, to run fast and loose with it like she’d always wanted. Her father had died before he’d found out how deep in debt she’d gotten.
She was now the debt-free owner of a business and a home, all thanks to her father, who had left her the house and made her the beneficiary of his life insurance policy. Being an adult was important to him. She owed him this. This was her penance for causing him and her grandmother so much grief, for her astounding inability to tamp down all her restless energy when she was younger and live the quiet life they wanted.
Springsteen was singing “I’m on Fire” when she opened the door. She looked up, and the man on her doorstep said, “We meet again.”
Any sound that might have been forming in her throat disappeared. When she opened her mouth, all that came out was breath filled with dissolved words.
“You ran away so fast today that you forgot this.” He held out the invitation.
She took it quickly and, inexplicably, hid it behind her back.
He put his hands in his pockets. He was still wearing the same pants and dress shirt from earlier, now dry and resembling crumpled paper. The sharp light from the globe beside her door was making him squint a little, causing small lines to crinkle around his eyes. He stared at her a moment before he said, “I took the blame for all your pranks in high school. The least you can do is invite me in.”
That snapped her out of it. “You didn’t take the blame, you took the credit,” she said.
He smiled. “So you do remember me.”
Of course she remembered him. It was what made being caught on Jackson Hill all the more embarrassing. Even though she’d never paid much attention to Colin in school, everyone knew who he was. He was an Osgood. But he’d always been eclipsed by his popular and headstrong twin sister. Not that he seemed to mind. He probably could have been as popular as Paxton was, but he’d never seemed as interested as his sister in running for student body president every year and joining three million different clubs. He’d mostly hung out with boys who wore pastel polo shirts and played golf on the weekends. He’d seemed destined to come back after college and take his father’s place as King of the Links, but for some reason he stayed away. She had no idea why.
Willa hadn’t intentionally tried to frame him for her pranks in high school. At the beginning of their senior year, she’d snuck out one night and put a quote by poet Ogden Nash on the school’s marquee. CANDY IS DANDY BUT LIQUOR IS QUICKER. She’d overheard Colin say it—he’d been quoting it all day—and she’d thought it was funny. What she didn’t know was that Colin had just turned in an independent-study essay on Ogden Nash the day before, so she had inadvertently pointed the finger at him. No one could ever prove it was Colin, and his parents had made absolutely certain that Colin was never held accountable, but every prank Willa had pulled up until then, and every one after, had been credited to him. He had earned the respect of being the Walls of Water High School Joker, the hero of students, the bane of the teachers’ existence. It was only when Willa had actually been caught, three weeks before graduation, that everyone had realized it was her, not Colin.
“Are you going to let me in or not? The suspense is killing me.”
She sighed as she stepped back. When he entered, she closed the door behind him, then she stepped over to her iPod speakers next to her computer and turned the volume down, before Springsteen could sound any sexier. She turned to see Colin walking around, absently running his hand over the back of her super-soft couch. It was that kind of couch. You just had to touch it. After almost seven years, it was the first new thing she’d bought for the house, and it had been delivered just days ago. It was expensive and impractical, and she felt suitably guilty, but she was ridiculously in love with it.
“No one told me you’d moved back,” Colin said.
“Why would they?”
He shook his head as if he didn’t know the answer. “How long have you been here?”
“Since my dad died.”
Colin’s shoulders dropped a little. “I was sorry to hear about what happened.” Her father had been hit and killed trying to help someone change a tire on the interstate during what would have been Willa’s senior year in college, if she hadn’t flunked out. Another thing her father hadn’t known about. “He was a great teacher. I had him for chemistry in eleventh grade. He had a dinner for his AP students here at his house once.”
“Yes, I remember.” She’d hated those dinners, actually having kids come to her house to see how she lived. She would hide in her room and pretend to be sick. There was nothing wrong with the house, it was just old and small, nothing like the mansions half the kids lived in.
“I’ve thought a lot about you over the years, what you were doing, what mischief you were getting yourself into.” He paused. “I had no idea you’d been here the whole time.”
She just stared at him, wondering why it mattered.
He circled the living room again, looking around, then didn’t seem to know what else to do, so he sat on the couch with a weary sigh. He ran his fingers through his dark hair. His hands were large. He was a big man, with a big presence. No one had seemed to notice that in high school. His time away had changed him, had given him a confidence, an air of independence, that he didn’t have before. “So what are you doing these days, Willa Jackson?”
“I own a sporting goods store on National Street.” There. That sounded responsible, didn’t it? Normal and practical.
“What do you do for fun?”
She gave him a funny look. What kind of question was that? “Laundry,” she answered, deadpan.
“Married?” he asked. “Kids?”
“No.”
“So no progeny to teach how to TP the high school lawn, or decorate the teachers’ cars with peanut butter, or put scandalous quotes on the school marquee, or switch the items in the school lockers of the entire graduating class?” He laughed. “That was a classic. It had to have taken all night.”
It was like it was a fond memory to him. But she’d purposely not revisited her pranks in years. And she hadn’t given Colin a second thought. Now, suddenly, she was remembering the look on his face when she’d been escorted out of the school by police after pulling the fire alarm. The whole school was out on the lawn. It was her, they’d whispered. Willa Jackson was the Walls of Water High School Joker! Colin Osgood had looked completely poleaxed. Though whether it was because it was her or because he couldn’t take credit for her pranks anymore, she didn’t know.
They stared at each other from across the room. She watched as his eyes traveled down her body, and she was about to call him on it when he said, “So, are you going?” He nodded to the invitation still in her hand. “To the gala?”
She looked down as if surprised to find the invitation there. She put it on the computer table, giving it a dirty look, as if this was all the invitation’s fault. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“So you only go to parties that have something to do with you? Your birthday party, for example.” After a short silence, he frowned and said, “That sounded funnier in my head. Sorry. Everything sudden
ly starts to seem funny when you’ve been up for forty-eight hours. I laughed at a speed limit sign on my way over here. I have no idea why.”
He was sleep-drunk. That explained a lot of things. “Why have you been up for forty-eight hours?”
“Couldn’t sleep on the flight from Japan. And I’ve been trying to stay awake all day so I could go to bed at a regular hour and not get hopelessly lost in the time difference.”
She looked toward the window. “Did someone drive you here?”
“No.”
She met his eyes. They were dark and unnerving and very, very tired. “Are you okay to drive home?” she asked seriously.
He smiled. “That was a very responsible thing to ask.”
“Let me get you some coffee.”
“If you insist. But the old Willa would have found some way to take advantage of this situation.”
“You have no idea who the old Willa was,” she said.
“Neither do you, obviously.”
Without another word, she turned and went to the kitchen, where she managed to spill both the coffee grounds and the water. She just wanted to get her father’s old percolator going so she could give Colin a jolt of caffeine and have him be on his way.
“Do you go up to the Blue Ridge Madam often?” Colin called from the living room.
“No,” she answered. Of course he’d get around to that.
“So you weren’t planning a prank for, say, the big gala?” He actually said that hopefully.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Willa mumbled.
Leaning against the kitchen counter, she watched the percolator as it gurgled and took its time. When it had finally made enough for a single serving, she poured some into a cup and took it to the living room.
He was still sitting on her gray microsuede couch, his hands on his knees, his head resting back against the cushions.
“Oh, no,” she said, panicking as she set the cup down on the end table. “No, no, no. Colin, wake up.”
He didn’t stir.
She reached over and touched his shoulder. “Colin, I have your coffee. Wake up and drink some.” She shook his shoulder. “Colin!”