Hale Maree (7 page)

I get off the couch and stand in center of
the little cabin living room, unsure of where to go or what to do
next. My bags aren’t on the floor anymore. I bet he took them
upstairs. Another squinty stare out the sunroom windows and I can
make out Oscar’s shape, moving down to the water’s edge, so I
decide to creep my way up the stairs and find my things.

The staircase is narrow and the steps are
steep. I can only put the balls of my feet on them to climb, and I
hold tightly to the railing. At the top, there is a wide open door.
The landing leads into a huge room. I feel for a light switch
inside the doorway, but when I flip it up, the room is only cast
with the flicker of fake candles plugged in on each side of the
bed, and the light makes the room jump with shadows. I step back,
clinging to the rail and ready to run, until I realize the shadows
are cast from the swaying trees outside. I creep over to the foot
of the bed where my bags and Oscar’s are heaped together on the
floor. I peer out of the enormous window that overlooks the inland
lake outside. The thick curtains, that should probably be drawn
shut, are tied back at either side of the window. I try to see
Oscar down below, but it is too dark.

There are two matching dressers against the
opposite walls, and a wicker chair with fluffy cushions pointed
toward the sprawling bed that takes up the middle of the room. The
bed has huge, wood balls at each corner and, when my eyes travel
upward, I see a skylight surrounded by mirror tiles on the
ceiling.

Oh my God. This is obviously
not a bed for sleeping. The thought of Oscar, or Mr. Maree, being
here, doing
those things,
makes the shaking tree shadows suddenly look like
ghosts of women dancing around the edges of the bed. My stomach
turns and I spin on my heel, grabbing two of my bags, to retreat
down the stairs, but run flat into Oscar’s chest. The impact knocks
me backward, but Oscar grabs my upper arms so I don’t fall right on
my rear end.

“
You okay?” he asks. Of
course I’m not, and I don’t know when I’ll ever be okay again, but
his hands, curled around my arms, send the radioactive waves right
through me. As if I need that. The ghost women dance around us like
they’re doing voodoo, throwing their thin arms, and swaying their
leaves. The glinting candlelight catches in both Oscar’s eyes and
the mirrors overhead. Without any warning, the room fills up with a
milky glow, as the clouds move away from the moon
overhead.

“
Come and lay down with me,”
he says. I stand there, like a scarecrow, as he walks away. He
sits, kicks up his feet on top of the covers and lies back with his
arms folded behind his head.

“
It’s okay,” he says,
flicking his eyes to the unwrinkled, emptiness beside him. “I’m not
going to lay a finger on you. I promise. Get under the covers if
you want. I’ll stay on top. Just come talk to me.”

I don’t. I’m not that stupid. Instead, I
move along the outskirts of the room and take a seat in the
catcher’s-mitt-shaped wicker chair. It creaks and snaps as I sit
down, and the voodoo ghost women flail their arms before they
finally settle down too.

“
What do you want to tell
me?” I ask.

“
Nothing,” he says. He keeps
his eyes on the ceiling. “I spent the ride up here telling you
about me. But now I want to hear about you.”

“
I want to talk about
Sophia,” I say.

The hint of a frown streaks across his
profile before he asks, “What about her?”

“
Aren’t you mad? Aren’t you
flipped out over what happened?”

“
Of course I am,” he says.
“I’m mad as hell. I didn’t even know she was cheating on me until
the guy confronted my dad. And now the guy is dead. I’m completely
flipped out about the entire thing. That’s why we’re
here.”

“
But you talked to
her.”

“
I did. Today.” He finally
takes his eyes off the ceiling and stares at me from the bed. It
gives me an unsettled feeling, like a moth spotted in a room. “She
acted like nothing happened. She might not have heard yet. All she
wanted to do was make plans for Landon’s birthday. It made me sick
to know that she would act like everything was good between us,
when she’d been with someone else.”

“
Why would she send him
after you?”

“
No idea. I’ve already told
you this. I don’t know anything, except that he showed up at the
bar and didn’t recognize that my dad wasn’t me.”

I want to believe him. The clouds drift over
the moon, darkening the room, but his eyes are still on me. The
voodoo tree ghosts wave their arms in dramatic bursts, but then
grow still, and it’s just Oscar and me in this bedroom, alone
again, looking at one another in the flickering, fake candlelight.
I want to believe every word, and make this whole crazy mess feel
logical, or even just possible, but I can’t. This whole thing is
dangerous and stupid.

“
If the cops find out what
happened, it won’t make any difference if we’re married. In fact,
it’ll look worse. It’ll look exactly like what it is: a cover
up.”

Oscar rolls off the bed and onto his feet.
He glides toward me like smoke, and I press my back into the chair,
as he moves closer.

“
You’re my alibi, Hale,” he
says. He drops down on his knees in front of me, so that we are
looking at each other at eye level. “This is a marriage of
convenience for both of us. My family has lots of money. Whatever
you want, I can probably get it for you. My dad’s already setting
your father up with a good business.

“
And you’ve got the ability
to be my father’s alibi, Hale. You and your father can clear my
father’s name. All you have to do is be the girl I’ve been in love
with. Marry me. It would be proof to the world that my father and
your father had already gone home together before it all happened.
If we said we were hanging out at your house that night. We could
be their alibi. They could look forever for the other drunk who did
a hit-and-run on Tatum. That stuff happens. It’s not wrong, what
I’m asking you to do. I’m just asking you to stop an innocent man
from losing everything over something that wasn’t even his fault.
No one meant to hurt anyone, but the accident happened and it could
end up hurting all of us. Unless we do this the right way, and then
no one gets hurt. It’s a good deal, Hale. You should take
it.”

“
So, if it’s a marriage of
convenience, than we don’t really have to be...
technically
married to each other,” I
say. His eyes are so steady that they make me feel like I’m
rippling. “You could have girlfriends, and I wouldn’t have to...we
wouldn’t have to, you know, live together, like married
people.”

Oscar reaches out, sliding his fingertips
softly over my knee.

“
That wouldn’t work,” he
says. “This isn’t how I ever expected to find a wife either, but it
is what it is. We need to be able to trust each other completely. I
don’t see how either of us could do that, if we were dating other
people and just living a lie. I’m for real, Hale. I know you’re
nervous, but way back in my family history, there were lots of
arranged marriages, and they worked. If both people want to be
married to one another, if they really believe in making it work,
they can be happy.”

“
I don’t know what to say,”
I tell him. I feel the gentle pressure of his fingers on my
knee.

“
Say yes,” he
says.

“
You’re a
stranger.”

“
But I don’t have to be,” he
says. His fingers slip up my leg and I tense. He whispers, “Don’t
be afraid of me, okay?”

I’m scared all the way from one end to the
other as his fingers move up to my thigh. All my thoughts spin and
collide in my head like asteroids. I want my dad to have a chance.
I want him to get off welfare. I don’t want to be trapped all my
life by poverty either. Maybe this is the way out.

But I don’t know who this man is, that is
kneeling in front of me, sending shock waves through me with his
touch. I keep glancing away, but every time I look back, his gaze
is still there, intense and rooted and somehow, gentle. I’m
starting to feel all Munchausen. How can I just do this in this
strange house, in this strange room, with this stranger, even if I
do know he likes Steinbeck and the color yellow?

But what difference does it really make? So
what if I get married or have my first time here? I’m eighteen. His
eyes are so deep; I want to climb into them and hide from all of
this. Why do I need to stay a virgin? Why not just make the jump?
His touch slides under the frayed edge of my shorts and the
tingling inside me goes into overdrive.

“
Mmm.” His eyes close with
the sound he makes.

“
This isn’t right,” I tell
him.

“
Sure it is,” he murmurs.
“This is what married people do...”

His fingertip crests the inside of my thigh
and as many tingles as there are, the absolute fear of what he
means to do with me sends a cold, hard shake all the way into the
very middle of my gut. I pull his hand away and am surprised at how
easily he lets me do it.

“
I don’t know you, and we’re
not married people,” I say. He sits back and gives me a
closed-mouth grin. It’s an
okay, not this
time
kind of grin that is even more
unsettling than the quiver of ice cold fear I had a moment ago. The
grin scares me most because, while it says
not this time
, it also says, as clear
as day,
next time.

CHAPTER FIVE

OSCAR SAID HE WOULD SLEEP downstairs, but
when I wake up and roll over in the morning, my face smashes up
against his bare back. I skitter backward, right off the bed and
Oscar rolls over, rubbing his eyes. He’s still got his pants on,
but no shirt, no shoes and, as I stare at his bare chest, all I can
think is that his chest looks like it has been totally serviced. I
could probably bounce a quarter off any muscle between his neck and
belly button. Oscar smirks at me and stretches as he sits up.

“
That wasn’t so bad, was it?
Our first time sleeping together,” he says. Another smirk from over
his shoulder. His back is as solid as his front, for God’s sake. It
twangs a cord of desire between my legs that vibrates a strong note
of panic right into my stomach and makes my heart race. Oscar
wouldn’t have any problem holding me down if he wanted to. I wonder
if that’s why he’s half naked; he wants me to know who’s really got
the upper hand here.

“
Virgin humor,” I say
sourly. “That’s really funny.”

That wipes the smirk off his face. He stands
up and goes to one of his bags. The sun shines through the window
and his skin is so smooth and tan in the light, it appears nearly
edible. I look away.

“
I just meant that you don’t
have to worry about sleeping beside me. You need to be fine with
it, because there’s only one bed, and I’m not sleeping on the
couch.”

“
I can,” I say, but I feel
the twinge of regret over not being able to wake up in this
gorgeous bed with the sun reaching through the skylight to warm the
sheets. Or maybe it was Oscar warming the sheets.

I shouldn’t feel any regret about not waking
up beside him, but a tiny, dirty little part of me does. I’ve
always been one of those girls who practiced abstinence, and
preached its benefits to my choirgirl, Sher, but we both knew that
our virginity wasn’t always intact because we wanted it that
way.

But we knew we
should
. Sher’s mother
beat it into our heads, usually with an arm wave to their
overly-child-packed apartment and the advice, “Don’t get knocked
up, girls. You see what happens? You get to work three jobs, and
you’ll still never have enough. Or you’ll die from a sex disease.
Or, at the very least, everyone will think you’re a whore. Do
yourselves a favor and keep your legs shut.”

Sher and I repeatedly told
each other how smart we were for never screwing around, but we also
talked at great length about how we thought it all worked, how we
thought we would do it, who we’d do it with, and how much we wanted
it to happen. And, at night, I couldn’t help that, sometimes, I’d
think about the way a guy looked at me at school, or I’d read a hot
scene in one of the romance books, and my fingers would meet up
with my desire in the dark. I’d fantasize that it was someone
else’s fingers inside me and it would feel like fireworks when I
came, but once I was done, I’d always feel guilty and ashamed for
having done it at all. I knew this was how I was supposed to feel,
because my dad, and Sher’s mom, and TV church broadcasts on Sunday
mornings, kept saying that girls were never supposed to want to do
that kind of thing with themselves, or with anyone else. When I’d
admitted it to Sher once, she just laughed her squealy,
high-pitched, nervous laugh and said,
Oh
my God!
But she never actually said that
she did it too, or that she had that same kind of intense
urge
like I
did.

Now, looking at Oscar’s half-naked body,
that deep urge tugs at me again and I’m ashamed that it’s there at
all. Even if I think about marrying Oscar, it doesn’t make the urge
feel okay. I just feel like I should never, ever want to do what my
body seems to be screaming for me to do. And then, on top of the
guilt, I feel like an enormous loser prude.