will freak if I stay out all night,” Lia said as he cut the engine in front of the office.
“I’ll take you home. I just need to be alone with you. Really alone.” Since Christmas, her parents and his mom had been fairly flexible about them staying together in their respective rooms, but that didn’t alleviate all the weirdness of having sex in your parents’ house. All their sex lately had been hushed and vaguely guilty, constantly aware of the chance her parents or his mom would hear.
A motel seemed tacky, but right now, feeling the way he did, Alex didn’t mind tacky. He needed some fucking peace.
“Okay.” Her smile was fragile, and her voice soft, like she expected him to explode any second. Was he scaring her?
“You’re okay with me, Lee. Always.”
“I know. It’s you I’m worried about. Something’s wrong. You had to do something bad, didn’t you? For my dad?”
All Alex could do was stare at his hands on the steering wheel.
“Let’s get a room.”
~oOo~
Tackiness abounded. The owners had embraced the beach theme wholeheartedly: the walls were papered in an almost-solid blue that no doubt had been named ‘Marine Something or Other.’ The mirror frame was covered with tiny, glued-on seashells. A framed seascape print—seashells on that frame too—loomed over a sand-colored vinyl headboard. Tiny surfboards made an argyle pattern over the cheap bedspread.
Beachgoers on a budget, definitely. Alex was ashamed of himself for bringing somebody as good as Lia to a tacky place like this.
He was ashamed of himself for a lot of things.
Laughing softly, she took off her coat and draped it over the back of the single chair in the room—next to the window, beside a small round table in white plastic.
“This is someplace the Winchesters would stay.”
“Who?”
“The Winchesters? Sam and Dean?”
Alex had no idea what she was talking about. “Did you go to school with them or something?”
“Oh my God, Alex. Supernatural?”
He’d heard of the show, but it was old and had been over for a long time. Then again, nothing was ever over when you could stream it whenever you wanted. “I never saw it.”
“It’s one of my mom’s favorite shows. I’ve seen all fifteen seasons probably five or six times. Elisa and I used to sit with her and binge like five …” She drifted off. Her head drooped, and she looked down at the flat brown carpeting.
It made him a jerk, but he felt a little better to see her sad. One thing he could do that wasn’t remotely wrong was make Lia feel better. “Hey.” He caught her hand and pulled her close. “I love you.”
Her eyes came to his, and she smiled. “I love you, too. I’m okay. I feel better, like I can be happy again and not feel like I’m hurting her somehow. But I don’t want to talk about me. Tell me what’s going on. If you can.” She plucked at his lapel with the hand he wasn’t holding, and Alex realized with a start that he was still wearing his suit. He’d gone straight from her father to her. “You only wear a suit for my dad. He made you do something bad, didn’t he?”
Alarmingly, his knees went weak, and he sat down suddenly without actually meaning to. He’d been standing by the bed, so he landed there at its foot with a bounce.
Lia sat beside him. “You can’t talk about it.”
He shook his head.
She set her head on his shoulder and slipped her fingers between his. “You know I love you no matter what, right?”
Maybe it was the echo of her words with his mother’s earlier that same day. Maybe it was the sweet sincerity of her voice, the simple acceptance. Maybe it was just the crashing wave of horror over what he’d done finally breaking into the shock.
Whatever it was, Alex felt tears forming.
Alex didn’t cry. His father had told him that real men didn’t cry, because tears were weak. His grandfather had told him to be strong for his mother. His mother had needed him to be strong. Lia needed him to be strong. He hadn’t cried when his father left, or when his grandfather died. He hadn’t cried when Angie Corti had hung him from a hook like a side of beef and tried to beat out of him information he didn’t have. He didn’t cry.
Except these tears were growing big, filling his chest, surging up into his throat, his brain, until they pushed into his eyes, and he was crying.