All the Lies We Tell (Quarry Road #1)(71)

“Yeah,” he answered after a few seconds’ hesitation and a quick glance at the windows. “Snowbound.”

“It would be great to do it even without the snow,” she said, and when he didn’t answer, she sighed. She shook her head. “You can’t even say that it would be great?”

“Alicia . . .”

“What?” she challenged, and got up to take her plate to the counter. She’d hardly touched a bite of her food and set about packaging it up to put away in the fridge. She wouldn’t look at him.

“I don’t want to give you the wrong idea.”

She turned at that. “About what?”

“Us.”

“I’m not asking you to marry me,” she said finally, her voice steady. “But what are we doing, if you can’t even tell me that you want to be with me?”

“You should know that I want to. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.” Nikolai frowned and pushed his plate away.

“So why can’t you just say so?” She leaned against the counter and pulled her robe closer around her. She was naked beneath it, and felt it.

“What do you want me to say?”

She sighed. “Anything. Something. Never mind.”

His phone buzzed from where he’d left it plugged in on the counter, and Nikolai got up to answer it. “Yes. No, it’s fine. I haven’t . . . I’d have to check. Well, I’m not there right now. I’m across the street.”

She straightened, looking at him. He looked back. She waited.

“I came to check on her, yes. She’s fine. I will. Where are you?” He paused, looking away from her. “Okay. You know it could be a while before the plows come back here. I think everything’s going to be shut down for a while. Yeah, I will. Okay. Sure. Yes . . . yes, Mom. You, too.”

He disconnected with a sigh and put the phone back on the counter. Alicia turned away to busy herself with putting away the extra food she’d made. She’d lost her appetite. When he came up behind her to put his hands on her hips, she didn’t push him away, but she didn’t lean back into him, either.

“How about we pick out some old creature feature, make some popcorn, and spend the day on the couch. We’re not going anywhere, not until the roads are plowed. And there’s not much point in shoveling while it’s still snowing.” He spun her slowly to face him.

“I’m sure you could make it across the street if you really had to.”

He smiled. “But I don’t want to.”

“You sure about that?” She eyed him. “It’s right across the street.”

He moved closer, one step. “But, all that snow, Alicia. So much snow. It’s really, really deep.”

“You’re a big, strong man. You lived in Antarctica,” she said, remembering.

Nikolai shook his head, those gray-green eyes wide and falsely innocent. “We didn’t go outside.”

“You didn’t—” He was on her then, his arms around her, and she let him kiss her. “You’re so full of bull, Nikolai. You know that?”

“I’ve heard that once or twice.” He nibbled at her jaw and tickled her sides until she squealed and tried to get away, only to have him draw her back close to him. He looked into her eyes. “There’s nothing else I’d rather do and no place I’d rather be than on that couch with you today. Okay?”

She nodded after a second or so. She could wait for him to give her pretty words, but how could she really expect them? She knew him—didn’t she?—even after all these years. Some things about him had changed, but not all things.

“Fine, but I get to pick the movie,” she said.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR


Then


There were no days when Alicia woke up without remembering what happened, but there had to be one someday, right? One morning when she would open her eyes without looking at her sister’s empty bed and being hit all over again with the reminder that Jennilynn was not out late. Jennilynn was never coming home.

Her mother waited barely a week after the funeral before she came in the room with a box of plastic garbage bags and started throwing things away. Clothes, makeup, sheets, old stuffed animals. She tore down the posters of Jennilynn’s favorite bands and cleared out the closet. There were things Alicia would’ve kept, not because she’d coveted her sister’s faded jeans or her Doc Martens, though she always had. She would’ve clung to them as a way of making herself feel as though Jennilynn wasn’t totally gone.

The house was quiet in the gray dawn, and Alicia could no longer sleep. She listened for the sounds of her parents getting up, moving around. Getting ready for work. Moving forward with their lives one day at a time in a way that seemed impossible to her, even now, almost a year later. She’d lost a sister, but they’d lost their daughter, and she couldn’t begin to imagine how they could function. All she knew was that they seemed to.

All she knew was that nobody talked about Jennilynn at all.

They took down the photos that hung in the hallway. The framed school pictures lined up on top of the cabinets. The magnetic cheerleading-team photos on the fridge. There were empty spaces where the pictures used to hang. Dust outlines on the walls. If something happened to her, Alicia thought, they would erase her just as easily as they’d done to Jennilynn.