Page 34 of Walking Wounded

Really, he has no idea whether Hal ever believed what he said the night of The Incident. He can’t let himself think about it too much; it only makes the impossibility of it all the sharper.

“I think,” Tara starts, and for the first time she sounds hesitant. “Maybe you should talk to Gramps about it.”

He lifts his brows.

“Trust me. Just…that’s part of the story. Somehow. I think.”

Tara Maddox, he thinks, isn’t wasted on political science. There’s a sharp girl hidden behind all the getup.

“Hey,” she says, smiling in a way he hasn’t seen before. She almost looks like she feels sorry for him. Or maybe that’s just his paranoid imagination at work again. “Let’s get outta here. I want to show you something.”

~*~

When a young, attractive woman says, “I want to show you something,” she’s usually talking about her tits – at least that’s Luke’s experience. But he doesn’t think that’s Tara’s game, not after his sidewalk “forever” confession, so he follows her. Walking is at least better than sitting still and letting the cold sink deeper into his bones.

Georgetown, he thinks, is too nice for him. And not because he’s broke and resents its loveliness; but because he has nothing lovely of his own to offer it.

Shoulders hunched against the cold, they walk past fashion boutiques with sparsely-dressed mannequins in the windows; lingerie boutiques with curtains in the windows; used bookshops packed with haphazard paperbacks he makes mental notes to revisit another time.

Tara turns down an alley, and unlike the alleys in New York, it has tidy cobblestone paving and doesn’t smell like piss and rotting garbage. Sensing that wherever they are, they’re at least safe, Luke keeps his curiosity to himself and follows Tara up a short flight of steps to a black-painted door without a sign or a number. She knocks three times, quickly, and then two slow beats. Luke hears the tumblers of a lock slide back, and then the door swings inward.

“Come on,” Tara says, and ducks inside.

Luke goes after her, stepping into a narrow, windowless hallway, dark as nighttime once the door thumps shut behind them. There’s someone back there, whoever let them in, but Tara plunges ahead, not giving him a chance to check over his shoulder.

“Is this a drug buy?” he asks.

“Shut up. No.”

The hallway opens up into a huge, high-ceilinged space with scraped hardwood floors and matte black walls. It’s a club of some sort: bar along one wall, DJ stand at the other; no doubt colored lights flash down from above when the main overheads are cut off. He spots a collection of small tables in one corner, and signs to indicate restrooms. The place bears that bleak, sad, washed-out look of all nightclubs in the daytime; the unglamorous behind-the-scenes revelation of extension cords, duct tape, and hasty paint jobs.

Luke wants to ask the point of this excursion, but then he sees it coming toward them with long strides: a young man whose face reveals that he’s wildly in love with Tara Maddox. Or at least in love with parts of her.

“Hi!” Tara squeals, her own face transforming with radiance, as she flings herself at the young man.

He grabs her and spins her around, her feet lifting up behind her like they’ve done this dozens of times before. The young man presses his face into her shoulder, eyes closing in brief, intimate joy.

For a second, Luke allows himself to envy them, and their easy freedom of loving each other. He won’t ever have this, and the knowledge sits bitter at the back of his tongue.

Then Tara’s feet hit the floor and she steers her boyfriend over toward Luke. “This is Dex. Dex, this is Luke. He’s the writer I told you about.” She grins at Luke, hand braced against Dex’s flat stomach. Love becomes her, for sure.

“You’re talking about me?” Luke asks, shaking Dex’s offered hand. The guy has a firm grip, if a little clammy. His longish hair, deep V-neck tee, and ripped jeans and Docs paint a picture of a young man the Maddox family isn’t going to want to meet.

In a small way, it warms Luke to think that Tara feels safe enough with him to introduce her inappropriate boyfriend to him.

“Good things,” Dex assures, drawing back.

“This is your club?” Luke asks.

Dex nods, and looks proud. “Yeah. About a year now.”

“Dex is a dancer,” Tara says. “Thebestdancer.”

“Well…” Dex ducks his head, blushing.

“He is,” Tara insists. “It’s how we met.”

“And that’s why you want to major in dance?” Luke asks her, smirking.

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