Even When You Lie, page 6
Cade grins. “Ready to leave?”
“Not yet,” I say.
Evangeline grabs my hand, her hair tumbling free of its barrette. “Bathroom?” she asks, in the age-old girls’ code of strength in numbers at any women’s restroom in a strange place.
We find it at the end of a dark hallway behind a heavy wooden door that leads to a dimly lit room, every bit as disgusting as I promised Cade it would be, and smelling of marijuana, vomit, Pine-Sol, and sweat. The trash can overflows in one corner and the door to the metal bin that sells tampons, condoms, and cheap cologne hangs half open.
“Shit,” Evangeline says. I expect her to say her barrette is broken, but she doesn’t; she only stares at a piece of paper taped to the wall.
“What is it?” I ask.
She rips the page away and holds it toward me, but her hand blocks most of the text. “That woman from yesterday. It’s her, isn’t it?”
The paper is thin, the kind bought to print flyers at home one at a time so the ink doesn’t streak, even though it always does. But the woman with the pink hair and tattoos is unmistakable in the photo, and while I don’t know the Latino man who has his arm around her, there’s something familiar about his nose and jawline.
They look so happy—alive and in love—like Cade and I must look in those rare stolen moments together when we’re away from the office that it almost takes my breath away.
“This is for a memorial service,” Evangeline says. “He died earlier this week. Maybe that’s why she came to Cade’s office?”
I look away while I still can, before her scrutiny draws the truth from me about Cade’s mumbled request last night as he fell asleep, that he loves me and doesn’t want to risk me.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe Cade knew him.”
“Cesar Morales,” Evangeline says. “It doesn’t sound familiar.”
A chill runs up the back of my neck like we’re outside in December, not inside a sweltering, stinking bathroom in late June, because I know that name from the birth certificate in that envelope and I am instantly, completely sober.
But she’s not Cade, so I don’t have to be honest with her, not entirely.
I finish washing my hands. “You want me to ask Cade?”
She shrugs. “It’s not like him to be uninterested in something like this.”
Her tone is curious, a question hidden there as to why he might not be, only I don’t want to discuss the events of the previous night. Instead, I snatch the flyer from her and fold it small enough to cram into a back pocket of my blue jeans, as if I can tuck away all the other problems it might bring.
On the other hand, if this is enough to persuade him to check into whatever this is all about, then I don’t have to feel guilty about almost lying to him earlier when I told him I’d leave it alone.
“Let me know what he says,” is all she tells me before disappearing into the bathroom stall.
When we return to the table, a petite blonde in a sheer top and a pair of Daisy Dukes chats up Armando while Cade plays on his cell phone. Evangeline slides between the blonde and Armando, resting an arm on his shoulder, and the blonde flashes a hopeful look at Cade, but scurries away when he tugs me onto his lap.
I nudge him and incline my head toward Armando and Evangeline.
“Armando told me he knew about us last week,” Cade says in my ear. “But they won’t tell.”
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“We wouldn’t be here otherwise,” he says.
The band starts a new set, but the food is cold, the drinks are empty, and the people on the dance floor are too drunk to do anything more than stumble into each other. Whatever magic this place held is gone, lost like the dead woman and her lover Cesar Morales.
Cade holds me against himself like a football, and I nestle into him despite the warmth, content that nothing can harm me in the security of his embrace. The niggling concern worms its way into my mind, that the dead woman might have thought that too, when Cesar Morales held her. Perhaps she held him when he died and that’s why it was so goddamn important she get that envelope to Cade’s office.
“Let’s go,” I whisper, and even though the band plays, I know Cade hears me because I feel him shift. “Take me home.”
But there is still magic in the feel of Cade’s fingers that lace through mine. He nods to Armando and says to Evangeline, “We’ll see you Monday, then,” and she rolls her eyes at Armando.
I look back as we leave the club. The sun and stars still glow on the sign, and next to them, the name spelled out in neon tubing is “Club Saturnalia.”
I shudder and hang closer to Cade.
CHAPTER
6
WE STAND ON a corner, waiting for Ubers with everyone else abandoning the bars in the hour before last call. While the backless tank top offers little defense to Cade running the back of a finger up my spine, the flyer in my pocket reminds me I have a secret.
Cesar Morales is dead.
The woman—whoever she is—is dead, too.
Don’t think about it, I tell myself. If I think about it, if I acknowledge it, he’ll be curious why his usual trick isn’t working. He’ll ask what’s wrong, and I can’t lie to him.
I close my eyes and concentrate only on his touch.
I’m too late, though, because he leans down to say, “I don’t like sharing.”
“That’s why we’re leaving,” I say.
“Hmm.” He brushes a kiss on my cheek. “I did think you were planning to make me wait until last call.”
We scramble into the back seat of a stranger’s sedan, its unfamiliarity jarring enough that I can forget the flyer and lose myself in Cade when he reaches for me. He kisses me until the stranger driving us clears his throat.
“We should have left earlier,” I whisper.
A stoplight illuminates Cade’s face long enough for me to see his grin because he doesn’t know what I found in the bar’s bathroom. “Isn’t the waiting the best part?”
“We’ll see,” I say.
“Oh, we’ll see, she says, like she doesn’t care.” Cade laughs under his breath and ropes a hand in my hair. “You’ll change your tune when we get home.”
We scamper across the apartment building’s lobby, past the doorman, who nods at Cade. As soon as the elevator doors close behind us, I pounce on Cade, flinging myself into his arms.
He picks me up, a hand under each thigh, and I kiss him, letting him feel my teeth. His fingers run up my spine and I tighten my grip on him with my legs. He half moans into my throat and slumps back against the wall.
I barely hear the elevator chime our floor, but he must, because he cradles me and rushes to the apartment door as if it were an end zone. By the time he fumbles the keys out of his pocket and opens the door, I’m yanking his button-down shirt over his head.
He slips his hands into the back pockets of my jeans to get a better grip before I can stop him. “What’s this?”
“Nothing,” I say, turning his face back to mine, hoping it’s in time to distract him.
Downtown Dallas glitters beneath us on the other side of the windows, enough for Cade to read the crumpled paper he tugs free, releasing me so suddenly I almost stumble.
“Reagan,” he says, wadding it up in his hand as he glances back to me. “We agreed we weren’t doing this.”
I don’t acknowledge the disappointment and betrayal in his voice; I only shrug and say, “We aren’t. I saw it and thought you might want to see it too.”
“You’re lying,” he says, but he follows me to the bedroom.
“I’m not,” I say. “Anyway, I was going to tell you—”
“But you didn’t,” he says.
“I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”
“It’s a gray area,” he says tightly, almost spitting the words.
I wrench him toward me by his belt loops, pressing myself up against him. “Learned from the best, Counselor.”
He turns my face up to his, swiping my lips with his thumb and letting it remain there. “Why’d you bring it home?”
It occurs to me then that we couldn’t have ended up at Club Saturnalia unless he was scoping things out, that maybe he opened that envelope last night and saw something to ignite his interest.
“Why’d we end up at that club?” I ask.
“You heard Armando,” he says. “It was his call.”
This is a non-answer, but I’ve seen Cade massage enough cross-examinations that I know even on a night where I hadn’t put away five Moscow mules—or was it six?—plus the Jell-O shots, I probably wouldn’t be able to back him into a corner unless he let me.
But I have other tools at my disposal.
I bury a hand in his hair, digging my fingernails into the back of his neck. “Don’t lie to me. Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
He is, I know he is. Cade is too good a defense attorney not to be.
But he remains silent.
I suck his thumb into my mouth and swirl it with my tongue until he jerks his hand back with a hiss.
“You want to go to the memorial service, is that it?” he asks. “Go. I won’t stop you.”
“It was Friday, damn it,” I say.
Late Friday morning.
Just a couple of hours before that woman walked into Cade’s office.
Maybe it’s the alcohol. Or maybe it’s the stress of the last two days, the tension between wanting him and not knowing why the woman came to him, the realization that my job and even my living situation in his apartment is utterly dependent on him, and I could be left like her, leaving flyers on the wall for a memorial service and begging strangers for help. But I burst out with, “You said this morning that you were worried that whatever happened to her could happen to me. Did you ever stop to think that whatever happened to him could happen to you? And then what about me?”
He slides free, and for a second, I think he’ll walk away.
But then he puts his hand on the wall and leans over me, kissing me until I’m breathless. “Tell me when to stop,” he says, grabbing a handful of my hair to pull my head back so he can nip at my neck.
I won’t, and he knows it.
He knows we’ll each go as far as we want, punishing the other one because we aren’t who we’re supposed to be, who the world believes us to be, because we recognize ourselves in each other. And so tomorrow the remnants of his kisses on my neck or along the inside of my thighs will amuse him, just as I will smile at the fingernail marks down his chest or up his back.
I tug his T-shirt over his head as he fumbles with the straps on my tank top, until I finally push him back and take it off myself.
“No bra,” he says and sighs. “You’re earning church tomorrow, aren’t you?”
I shove him backward onto the bed. “Says the heathen. You didn’t even go to church until I came along.”
“Didn’t see a need to,” he says. “But there’s something about you …”
He leans up on his elbows, watching me as I roll down the skinny jeans and toss them aside, leaving only the black lace thong.
“Uh-uh, Reag,” he says, pointing to the floor. “The shoes. Please?”
It’s that please that does it. That always does it, that hint of southern charm and courtesy my parents steeped me in and Cade must have been raised in too, even as we both have done everything we could to defy our families.
I fasten the high heels on, and he is there almost immediately, his hands tugging me on top of him.
But I’m in no hurry for the night to be over, not so soon, and so I let my heels dig in a little to his thighs. “Better pace yourself there, tiger.”
“Oh, no,” he says, and wraps a strand of my hair around his hand, pulling my face to his so he can kiss me. “We’ve got all night.”
And then there is nothing, nothing but us, alive and together, and I can’t think of anything but this man who thrust himself into the rigidly mundane life that I had fooled myself into accepting.
His touch that sets my body on fire.
His kisses that leave my mouth and skin tingling and craving more.
His body that consumes mine even as I consume his, the joint longing we have for each other, the mutual satisfaction we both lose ourselves in together.
“I love you,” he whispers when we’ve finally exhausted ourselves.
“I love you too,” I say, and drift off to sleep to him stroking my back.
* * *
I wake first and slip free of Cade’s embrace, gather the discarded clothes and Louboutins, and put them all away. In the bathroom I remove the smudged eyeliner and mascara that ring my eyes like a raccoon, brush my teeth, and step into a hot shower. By the time I emerge, cleansed of last night and wrapped in a towel, Cade appears, yawning into a cup of coffee, his hair ruffled to the point I can imagine him as a young boy.
We pass each other almost without acknowledgment.
I braid my hair, apply makeup, dress, and step into shoes. I leave the apartment before Cade gets out of the shower, the church bells pealing overhead in the still morning air.
It’s a ten-minute walk to First United Methodist. The church itself is old, older than Dallas maybe, maybe older than the hymn its bells chime, the tune as familiar as my grandmother’s quilt, even if the building only dates to the early twentieth century. By the time I arrive, the singing is in progress, and no one notices me steal into the darkened interior through a side door and sit on a rear pew.
My attendance here is as recent a habit as my affair with Cade. While I know well enough that the hellfire and brimstone God of my evangelical upbringing would surely consign Cade and me to the depths of Hell for the pleasures we take in his bed, and that God must know because He is all-knowing, there is something in these fleeting seconds of peace I find in my pew that draws me back every week.
Cade follows, entering halfway through the next song, as he has since a couple of weeks after I began sneaking away.
We don’t speak, don’t so much as glance at each other. We share a bed and the most intimate moments of our lives, but we won’t look each other in the eye when sitting in a pew with God between us.
The minister preaches on justice, our duties toward the less fortunate, and our obligation to assist. Unlike the preachers of my childhood, he doesn’t raise his voice, prowl the stage, or pound his hand against the pulpit.
But maybe he doesn’t need to, because Cade sighs and fidgets with his watch at the opposite end from where I’m sitting.
As the closing hymn begins, I sneak out the rear doors and into the noise of traffic rumbling overhead on the Woodall Rodgers Freeway and the pungent blend of hot asphalt and last night’s restaurant trash already baking. The old oak trees provide welcome shadows, and I hurry into their embrace and the slightly cooler air.
Cade joins me and brushes a quick kiss on my lips. “Thanks for waiting.”
I nod.
He offers me his arm and I slide my hand through for the stroll toward the café we usually brunch at on Sundays.
Cade clears his throat and says, “What he said in there …”
He exhales and shakes his head, but I wait. Whatever this is that he’s struggling to say needs to be said aloud rather than implied or couched in pretty platitudes. The words need time and space to breathe, the power that comes with being born into summer air ripe with dissent and dissatisfaction, the grumblings that justice has not been served.
Protest season possesses its own magic.
“Look, everything in me is warning that we don’t want to mess with this, that it’ll lead us somewhere we may not want to end up,” Cade says. “But if we don’t?”
There’s a long silence and I utter the words that terrify me, “Then who are we?”
We stop walking.
We face each other and see each other, recognizing ourselves.
He exhales and looks away for a quick second before we make eye contact again. “Find out what happened to Cesar Morales,” he says slowly, as if weighing the cost of every syllable.
“I can do that,” I say.
“Nothing official,” he says.
Even in my high heels, I have to stand on my tiptoes to kiss him. “Off the books and only if I have spare time at the office. I’ll be careful.”
“Please,” he says.
The unspoken reminder that he loves me and doesn’t like this idea fills the space between us, and I squeeze his hand.
He smiles as if he knows and steals a second kiss. “Now, may I interest you in a corner table and a chocolate croissant?”
We sit at our usual table at the café with our usual breakfasts, allowing our Sunday morning to continue in its usual manner, a luxury lost to Cesar Morales and his dead lover.
CHAPTER
7
I ARRIVE AT THE office first on Monday morning because I prefer it before the lights are on and the rooms fill with small talk and gossip and clients. I unlock the glass door, the one that passes the law firm receptionist’s desk, and then the one into Cade’s section.
Everything is just as Evangeline and I left it on Friday.
I sit at my desk, power on my computer, and eye my cell phone.
It will be another twenty minutes before Evangeline enters.
An appointment at the courthouse will keep Cade there until midmorning.
I flip through my contacts and find the number I need, but it goes to voice mail. “Hey, Miller, it’s Reyes. Give me a call when you get this, I have a question on a recent death in Deep Ellum.”
With that done, I turn my attention to my email. By the time Evangeline drops into her seat with a sigh, I’m tracking two other people who might be able to provide Cade’s reasonable doubt on another case.
Cade strolls through the glass doors at ten thirty, wearing a navy three-piece suit that he keeps in the rotation for court days because he knows the female jurors like it. “Ladies,” he says, like he didn’t kiss me goodbye and tell me he loved me at seven. “How’s the morning?”
“Quiet,” Evangeline says. “When’s your new intern arriving?”
Cade shrugs. “Due an hour ago. You want me to call and get him here?”
