Brown-Eyed Girl (Travis Family #4)(43)

Mortified to be caught in the pool with nowhere to hide, I shrank against Joe’s chest.

“Did Avery fall in?” I heard Jack ask.

“No, I dunked her.”

“Nice move” came the deadpan reply. “Want me to bring y’all a couple of towels?”

“Yeah, later. For now, I’d like some privacy.”

“Sure thing.”

After Jack left, I wriggled free from Joe and swam toward the shallow end. He kept pace with me, surging through the water with the ease of a dolphin. When I could stand with the water at chest level, I stopped and turned to face him with a scowl. “I don’t like to be embarrassed. And I don’t like to be pulled into swimming pools!”

“Sorry.” He tried to look and sound contrite, with only limited success. “I wanted to get your attention.”

“My attention?”

“Yeah.” He moved around me slowly, his gaze holding mine. “You’ve been ignoring me all day.”

“I was working.”

“And ignoring me.”

“All right,” I admitted, “I was ignoring you. I don’t know how we’re supposed to behave in front of people. I’m not even sure what we’re doing, and —” I broke off uneasily. “Joe, stop circling like that. I feel like I’m in the pool with a bull shark.”

He reached for me, pulling me forward until I was lifted off my feet, the momentum floating me against him. Pressing a scorching kiss to my neck, he murmured, “I’d like to take a bite out of you.”

As I tried to wriggle out of his arms, he gathered me up, deliberately keeping me off balance. “Come back here.”

“What are you doing?”

“I want to talk to you.” He took me to deeper water, where I was forced to cling to the hard slopes of his shoulders.

“About what?” I asked anxiously.

“About the problem we’re having.”

“Just because I don’t want to have a relationship with you doesn’t mean I have a problem.”

“I agree. But if you wanted to have a relationship and you couldn’t because you were afraid of something… then you would have a problem. And it’d be my problem, too.”

The skin of my face tightened until I could feel my cheeks pulsing. “I want to get out of the pool.”

“Let me say something – just give me a couple of minutes – and then I’ll let you go. Deal?”

I responded with a quick nod.

There was something spare and focused in the way he spoke. “Everyone has secrets they don’t want anyone to know. When you reckon all of it up… all those things we did or were done to us… all our sins and mistakes and guilty pleasures… those secrets are the sum of who we are. Sometimes you have to take a chance on letting someone in, because your gut tells you that person’s worth it. But then all bets are off. You have to trust them, and hope they won’t rip your heart out, and f*ck it, sometimes you make the wrong call.” He paused. “But you have to keep taking chances on the wrong people till you find the right one. You quit too damn early, Avery.”

I felt suffocated and miserable. It didn’t matter that he was right; I wasn’t ready for this. For him. “I’d like to get out now.” My voice came out thin and rickety.

Joe began to tow me to the shallow end. “Have you ever looked yourself up online, honey?”

Bewildered, I shook my head. “Steven handles most of the Internet stuff —”

“I don’t mean your business. I mean your own name. The first results page is all related to your work: some blogs that mention you, a link to a Pinterest board, that kind of stuff. But on the second page, there’s a link to an older article in a New York paper… about a bride who was jilted on her wedding day.”

I felt myself turn bleach white.

Sometimes when I thought about that day, I could will myself into a state of detachment and view it as if it had happened to someone else. I tried to do that right now, but I couldn’t manage to put any distance between me and that memory. I couldn’t be detached about anything when Joe was holding me. And he was going to force me to explain how, on what should have been the happiest day of my life, I’d been rejected, abandoned, and humiliated in front of everyone whose opinion mattered to me. For a woman with normal self-esteem, that day would have been devastating. For a woman whose self-esteem hadn’t been all that robust to begin with, it had been annihilating.

I closed my eyes as shame scalded every vein like poison. People who had experienced true shame didn’t fear death the way regular people did… we knew that death would be a lot easier to tolerate. “I can’t talk about it,” I whispered.

Joe guided my wet head to his shoulder. “The groom called it off that morning,” he continued evenly. “No one would have blamed the bride for falling apart. But instead she started making calls. She changed all the plans she’d made, so she could donate the wedding reception – which she’d paid for – to a local charity. And she spent the rest of the day with two hundred homeless people, treating them to a five-course dinner with live music. She was a fine, generous woman, and well rid of the *.”

It was a long time before I could speak. Joe’s fingers shaped to my skull and he kept his hand there, as if he were protecting me from something. I needed this more than I would have believed, latched so securely against him that his body formed the necessary margin, the boundary between me and the rest of the world.