Page 24 of Strict Confidence (Rochester Trilogy 2)
“But everyone loves lobster.”
“Back when Maine was still a colony, only the poor ate lobster. Livestock ate lobster. Prisoners ate so much lobster that it was deemed cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Okay, this doesn’t count as intimacy.”
“What? I’ve never told anyone that.”
“Because it’s random. Not because it’s important to you.”
I sigh. “I hate this game.”
“It’s not a game,” she says, slapping my chest. “I told you. Intimacy.”
“Fine. Fine. Here’s something no one knows. And something that’s important to me. I only wear boxer briefs. Boxers are too loose. Briefs are too tight. Boxer briefs are perfect.”
“Oh my God,” she says, exasperated.
“What?”
She sucks in a breath, as if gathering courage. “Tell me about Emily.”
I stop moving. Every muscle in my body goes still. Even my heart. “What about her?”
“I don’t know. Anything. Tell me about her.”
I thought I understood what it was like for Jane to share that story with me. It would be hard. She’d feel nervous, naturally. That was apparently a huge understatement.
Actually sharing hard shit feels like knives inside my stomach. I guess this is intimacy, cutting open your old scars to show people around inside them.
“She moved to town. I fell for her. Hard.”
“She was beautiful?”
“She was everything I thought a woman should be, even though we were only seventeen at the time. Beautiful. Smart. She had this way of carrying herself that made everyone look twice.” A rueful smile. “And maybe I liked her because she made me work for it. I went after her for all of senior year, but she wouldn’t let me past second base.”
Jane makes a face. “Not easy like me.”
“Nothing about you is easy,” I say on a sigh, my face against her stomach.
“You’re just saying that because you want me to have sex with you again.”
“Oh, you’re definitely having sex with me again. But you’re nothing like her. It was a game. She knew it was a game. We both did. Flirt with all the boys and see who wins a date.”
“And you were the winner?”
“I thought I was. I felt like a winner. She was mine. My girlfriend. We were going steady. But she wanted more than a house on the water. More than a lobsterman’s life. So I started building my business. The investors wanted me in LA where I could network with the right funding people, build a team of developers. I left her with my class ring on her finger.”
“Like an engagement ring?”
“A promise ring, at the very least. I thought she’d wait for me. Or at least call if she got tired of waiting.” It’s a foolish thing, but I find myself touching her finger. Her fourth finger, where a ring would go.
She laces her hand in mine.
“I was cocky enough not to expect a Dear John letter at all, but I sure as hell didn’t expect it to come from my brother. He called me to tell me they got engaged.”
“Oh, Beau.”
“It’s not a sad story. Well, it was sad at the time. I was pissed. And then drunk. And then pissed again. But really it was just a natural culmination of what we’d been doing the whole time. Being shitheads who cared more about winning than anything else.”
“Did you ever talk to her about it?”
“The business was already successful. After that happened, I pushed hard for a buyout. A big payday for everyone. I wanted the money, the success, to show her what she was missing. But then in the blink of an eye she was married to him, and it didn’t fucking matter anymore.”
“Of course it mattered. You loved her.”
“Love. What a strange idea.”
She puts a hand on my chest. Emotion. That’s what she means. What’s happening deep in my heart, in the bones and sinew of my body—but instead I feel only what’s on the surface. The slight weight of her hand, the smoothness of her palm, how badly I want her to keep moving her arm down. “You loved her. And you loved Rhys. Otherwise it wouldn’t have hurt when they betrayed you.”
“Or maybe I just didn’t like losing. Whatever the reason, I had more money than sense. I already knew Mateo. It was easy to fall into his crowd with money to throw around.”
“And then suddenly you disappeared.”
Her eyes are so dark and so wide. Luminous. I push a strand of hair out of her face. “The way you look at me… with so much trust. And kindness. It’s only because you think I’m someone else. If you knew the real me, you’d look at me different.”
An eye roll. “I could say the same thing about you.”
Except she’s wrong. I’ve already seen into the very core of her. The inherent goodness of her. This isn’t a game to her. I should have known that. I should never have touched her. This hasn’t been a game for her, and the worst part, it hasn’t been a game for me either. “One day Emily showed up at my penthouse. I was drunk. And completely taken by surprise. She’d been arguing with Rhys, she said. They were getting a divorce.”
