Page 99 of Silver-Tongued Devil
“I haven’t. You don’t know. Ihaven’t.It’s the same. It’s just the same. I’m always going to be…” Her chest worked to bring the word up, but when she did, it was a whisper. “Trash.”
Russell reared back. “Like hell you are. Like hell. If he says you’re trash,he’strash.”
“I can’t shake it, Dad. I can’t. And it hurts too much. I need to… I need to take a shower.” She had to keep going. She couldn’t let Blake win. She couldn’t let him beat her down. Not again. Not this time.
“You take a shower,” Russ said. “And then you talk to him. You don’t let yourself go down without a fight. I said not to fight on the phone, and I meant that. So you tell him face to face. You show him what he did. You tell him he was wrong. You give him a chance to tell you, too.”
“I already know.”
“You think you know. You love him, right?”
She was going to break into a thousand pieces. She was going to shatter.
Russell didn’t wait for an answer. “If you do, you give it a shot. And if you were right… you tell him what he did. You tell him he’s a piece of shit. You let him know. You go take care of your business, and if you go down, you take him with you. You go down swinging.”
The phone rang right about the time Blake was getting ready to make the call.
“Hey, baby,” he said. “Are you on your way? I just realized I owe Russell about ten dinners by now. My dad’s cooking this one, which means it’ll actually be decent.”
“I need to talk to you.”
The words hung there, and he’d stopped with his hand on one of the sliding doors to the deck. “Sure. What is it? Something wrong?”
The resort,he thought, and his blood went cold. He asked, “Did something else happen to you? Something bad?” He should have warned her. He should have told her already.
“I need to talk to you,” she said again. “Come meet me at City Beach.”
“What? Baby, my folks are here. Dinner’s almost ready. Come on over and tell me here.”
“I’ll be at City Beach in five minutes.” She sounded like a robot. Cold. Dull. Nothing at all like his warm, passionate Dakota. “I’ll be leaving there in fifteen if you haven’t showed up. Your house is finished. And don’t call me ‘baby.’”
“Dakota? What? What happened?”
It took him a good ten seconds to realize he was talking to a dead phone. He stared at it. His finger hovered over the button to call her back, but he didn’t.
He went back into the kitchen and said, “Sorry, guys. Something’s happened. I have to go see Dakota.”
His mother’s head went up. She’d been sitting at the breakfast bar with her wine, but now, she set the glass down. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to find out. Don’t wait on me for dinner.”
She was standing near the water.
The clothes she had on weren’t anything close to “dinner with the new boyfriend’s parents,” either. She was wearing the sage-green embroidered top she’d worn the first time she’d come to his house, a pair of short cream-colored shorts, and flat sandals, and her hair was wet and twisted up into a clip. That was a very bad sign.
He got closer and saw that she wasn’t wearing makeup, and she had her glasses on. That was a worse sign, but the look on her face was the clincher.
“Dakota.” He caught thebabyon the way out of his mouth. “What’s wrong?”
“Let’s see.” Her voice shook on the words with what looked way too much like fury. “That you told your teammate to come to your house so I could make porno art for him, since that’s what I do? That you made me think you cared about me and then told everybody else that I wasn’t…” She took a breath and went on fast. “That I wasn’t good enough? That I wasn’t the kind of woman you wanted to marry? That I was just for fucking. That you want toshareme. With yourteammate.”
“What?”He shook his head like that would help. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No?” She came closer, then, and shoved a flat hand into his chest. “I wasthere,Blake.I heard what you said. Did you send him on purpose? Maybe you were sorry you’d asked me to meet your parents. Maybe you realized you’d beembarrassed,because I’m not—what was it? A classy woman with her own money and a big-time job? Well, no. I’m not. I’m a house painter whose stepdad is an alcoholic who can’t keep up with his mortgage. My parents weren’t married, and my mom slept around and had two kids by two different guys, and then she dumped us. My father’s back in prison again, and he’ll probably be there most of his life, and it doesn’t matter, because I don’t know the guy. I’ve got no DNA anybody would ever want. I’ve got tattoos, I’ve got too many piercings, and I didn’t go to college. I’ve got nothing that means anything at all in your world. But I’ll tell you something. I didn’t ask for this. I don’t deserve this. Just because two guys thought I was trash, just because I’ve been violated and hurt, just because Isharedthat with you, that doesn’t give you the right to do it again. That doesn’t mean I’m there for every man to share and fuck and throw away andtalk aboutand treat like trash. I never signed up for that. I’m a person. I have feelings. All you had to do was leave me alone. If I’m trash… “ Her voice wobbled, and there were tears in her eyes, and he couldn’t stand it. “Why couldn’t you just leave me alone? Why? Why did you have to make me feel like trash again? What did I do to you?”
He’d been trying to break in since she’d started, but she’d kept going. Now, he said, “Dakota. Baby. No. No, I didn’t.”
He’d thought it had hurt when he’d seen her on that hospital bed, and it had. But that day, he’d known she was getting better, that she would come out of it. Now, though, she was shrunk in a way she hadn’t been then, and he couldn’t stand it. “I didn’t say that,” he went on desperately. “I wouldn’t have said that. Never. That’s not how I feel. Tell me what happened, and I’ll make it right.”
