Keeping Secrets in Seattle

chapter Twelve


September 10, 2003

His lips were every bit as soft as I always thought they would be. And though he simply nipped at my lower lip, just a nibble, it made all of the air escape from my lungs. When I sighed and tried to deepen our kiss, Gabe jerked his head back half an inch and looked at me with a satisfied grin. He didn’t say a word. His thrilled expression said it all. Our first official date started off so perfect. Who knew what a disaster the night would turn into…

“Holy crap. Is that bulgogi?” Gabe held open his apartment door.

“And bindaeddeok.” I held up another box as I breezed through the door. “Isn’t Alicia home from the fitting yet?”

He shut the door behind me. “No, she and Marissa had to take the ferry to Whidbey Island to talk to some guy about his string quartet to play at our rehearsal dinner. She’ll be gone for the rest of the day.”

I smirked and hurried around the corner into the kitchen before he could see. “A string quartet? Fancy. If that’s what we’re in store for at the rehearsal dinner, then I can’t wait to get to the reception.”

“Tell me about it.” Gabe plucked some chopsticks from my armload and grabbed a box. “This fiasco is taking over my life. And bank account.” He popped a piece of meat into his mouth. “Thanks for the food. You always know what I like.”

“You still planning a wedding to rival Will’s and Kate’s?” I pried open my own box of food and started poking around in it.

He shrugged and leaned against the kitchen counter. “Alicia is.”

I bit back all of the less-than-savory things I wanted to say about his fiancée and popped a giant bite of kimchi into my mouth. I’d always felt like Alicia’s friendliness toward me wasn’t exactly genuine, but now I knew it. Those icy glares she shot at me when she thought I wasn’t looking confirmed that fact. And lest I not forget the things Shawn told me about her. I needed to get to the bottom of this. Did she really love Gabe, or was there something else she was after?

“What did you get?” He looked over at my box. I showed him, and he shuddered. “I don’t know how you can eat that stuff. It smells like feet.”

I accepted his effort to change the subject. “Oh, this from the guy who eats pork rinds? Those things are repulsive, and they smell like farts. Are you kidding me?”

“Pork rinds have nothing on kimchi.”

“Oh, please. You just say that because you’re too chicken to try it.”

His forehead wrinkled. “I am not. I just don’t like eating things that smell like gym shoes.”

I scooped out a giant spoonful of the fermented cabbage. “Whatever, dude. You can’t eat hot stuff. You’ve got no tolerance for hot food, but you play it off like you don’t like it, to appear more manly.”

“Whatever, Vi.”

“It’s true! You can’t eat your mother’s enchiladas, either.”

He wiped his face on a napkin, then tossed it in my direction. “You think you’ve got me so figured out. I’m plenty manly.”

“Are you? Then take a big ol’ manly bite of kimchi to prove it.”

He glared at me, the corners of his full lips twitching. “You’re such a jerk.”

I held the spoon underneath his mouth. “Whatever. Take a bite, and prove me wrong.”

He snatched the spoon from me and savagely jammed the blob of kimchi into his mouth. Within seconds, his eyes began watering and his cheeks turned bright red. I sat there snickering as Gabe chewed and tried to swallow, retching slightly every time he attempted. A thin line of sweat beaded at his hairline. After three or four attempts at choking the bite down, he spat it into the sink and flicked on the garbage disposal.

I smirked. “Ha. I told you.”

He cast a fake glare over his shoulder and sauntered out of the kitchen. “Nobody likes a sore winner.”

I looked around the rest of Gabe’s apartment. “What are you working on?”

His dining room table was littered with poster boards covered in brightly covered slogans and different versions of the same black-and-white photograph of an eagle taking flight. His laptop was running with several windows open on its screen, and there were a few dozen crumpled pieces of paper scattered around the floor. From the corner of my eye, I saw that there were several more crumpled papers on the shelf where the framed snapshot of Cameron was. My stomach twisted around itself. I was starting to have nightmares about that night again.

“I have a presentation on Monday that I’m totally behind on.” Gabe cast a frustrated glance at the mess. “I think I made a breakthrough this morning, though, so I should be able to pull something together soon. It’s a big account, and I need to win them over. I need my bonus more than ever right now.”

I looked at him through the corner of my eye. His brow was furrowed, and he was clenching his jaw. “If it helps, I paid the same amount for a dress this morning as a 1985 Honda would cost.”

Gabe’s eyes widened. “How much did you pay? I told Alicia not to pick out something unreasonable.”

I loved that he was looking out for me, but the mention of his fiancée’s name made me nauseated. “Don’t worry about it. It looks awesome on me.”

One corner of his mouth perked upward. “That I don’t doubt.”

“Have you guys picked out tuxes yet?” I asked, looking at some of the discarded papers on the table.

“Yeah.” He scruffed his hand across the back of his neck.

I elbowed him. “Well?”

“Well, what?” Gabe laughed.

“What do they look like?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. They were black with silver ties. Very fancy. Very manly.”

Smirking, I went back to the papers on the table. “Manly? This from the guy who just choked on a small bite of kimchi.”

Gabe grabbed my arm and pulled me against his chest, his pursed lips tugging up in the corner. “Oh, I can be manly.”

“That so?” My knees started shaking.

He grinned smugly, his face inches from mine. “Your breath smells like feet.”

I shoved him. “Shut up. Go get a towel and chair. We need to cut your hair, Marlboro man.”

He turned and strutted down the hallway toward his bathroom, and I unpacked my bag, carefully laying the scissors, razors, and combs on the granite-top counters. When Gabe sauntered back into the kitchen with a towel thrown over his shoulder, I pulled a dining room chair into the middle of the kitchen floor and patted it. “Sit.”

Gabe raised his T-shirt over his head and peeled it off, exposing his splendidly cut chest and abs, all covered in the most radiant brown skin I’d ever seen. Drawing a sharp breath, I pretended to cough when Gabe looked at me curiously. I begged God for the strength not to purr while running my hands down his stomach—which was, of course, my first instinct.

I put my palms on his shoulders the way I usually did with my clients but instantly jerked them up to the back of the chair.

Gabe looked up at me with a grin. “Do you want me to put my shirt back on?”

“No.” My reply came out loudly, and I cringed. “What I mean is, I don’t have an apron, so you’ll probably get hair under your collar, and it will get all scratchy.”

Plus, if you put your shirt back on, I won’t be able to stare at your bodacious body.

I grabbed my scissors. “So, are we doing the usual cut?”

He settled into the chair and closed his eyes. “Work your magic, Vi.”

I’d googled Alicia Von Longorial—aka Alicia Long—on the bus ride over to Gabe’s apartment, but other than a couple of local advertisements bearing her pale face and rail-like body, I’d come up empty-handed. It was time to do some subtle interrogation.

“If Alicia is a model, why are you the one paying for everything?” I asked, clipping the hair close to his ear.

“She’s still starting out, and her job at the restaurant only pays minimum wage,” he said. “Besides, we’re getting married. My income is our income now.”

Not yet, I thought bitterly. “And her family isn’t paying for a thing?”

Gabe shook his head. “They’re paying for the flowers and part of the catering. But Alicia’s dad is really big on self-sufficiency. So we’re trying to take care of it ourselves.”

“Huh.” I ran a brush through his hair. “Where are her parents from?”

“Portland. Alicia went to South Summit High.”

“And they’re wealthy?” I pressed.

Gabe looked up at me and grinned. “They do all right. I haven’t asked her dad for a bank statement or anything.”

I decided to push the subject further. “Well are their cars nice? What about their house? Is it huge?”

“I…actually, I don’t know. I’m assuming so, based on what Alicia’s told me.” Gabe took another bite.

I scrunched up my face. “Why don’t you know?”

He seemed oblivious to my concern while I gripped my clippers with white knuckles. “The times I’ve met them, they’ve come to Seattle to visit us. We’ve gone to nice restaurants, though.”

“Who paid?”

Gabe let one of his shoulders rise, then drop. “I dunno. I did, I guess.”

An overwhelming protectiveness came over me, and I had to fight the urge to growl like a mother tiger. He explained how he once imagined himself getting married in his parents’ backyard, with twinkling lights strung along the fence and his father working the grill on their back porch. I made a face when Gabe bemoaned how the intimate affair he’d envisioned had grown into the over-the-top gala Alicia was planning. He described how she’d always dreamt of a fairy tale wedding, and how he didn’t have the heart not to give it to her.

“Have you talked to her about scaling things down a bit?” I was careful not to sound bitter.

“Yeah, but she just cries. She says I guilt trip her for wanting her one special day. And I hate seeing her cry.”

“That’s nice of you.” I tried not to gag and folded down the cuff of his ear so I could trim around it carefully. “But, you’re going to be paying off this wedding for ten years. Do you realize that? Does Alicia really want to start off your marriage with a ton of debt?”

“I haven’t told her how much debt we’ve acquired just yet.”

I groaned. “At this rate, you could be on a second mortgage by the big day.”

Gabe glanced up at me. “The things a guy will do for the woman he loves, right?”

I bit my lip. He might as well have punched me in the gut.

There was an awkward pause.

“Enough about that. Did you girls have fun trying on dresses and stuff?” he asked.

Swallowing my compulsion to blurt out everything I’d heard Alicia say, I said, “Sure. What did Alicia say about it?”

“Well, we haven’t seen each other yet today, since she had so much wedding stuff to do. But when she called, she said that everyone had been fitted and that the dresses were all picked out.” He looked up at me with a worried expression. “Did something go wrong?”

“No, not exactly.”

“What’s up?” Gabe asked.

“Nothing’s up.” My voice was high-pitched, and I cleared my throat again.

“You’re being cryptic. What gives?”

“Everything went fine. I just think that some of the girls…left with slightly smaller egos than they may have had before.”

Gabe’s laughter filled the kitchen. “Well, that might be a good thing. Since some of Alicia’s friends are…”

“Snobby bitches?” I bent to trim the hair at his neckline.

“Be nice.”

I tapped his shoulder. “You started it. But honestly, they are a snooty group.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But Alicia’s known some of them for a long time, and she can’t help how her friends are.”

Gabe was still under the impression that Alicia wasn’t nearly as pretentious as her friends. How she managed to keep such a dominant personality trait a secret from the man she was in love with, sleeping with, and engaged to marry was beyond me. She deserved an Academy Award.

“It’s a good thing Alicia is different then, huh?” I pulled the towel from his shoulders, scattering his dark hair all over the kitchen floor. “You’re all done. Go look in the mirror and make sure it looks all right.”

When Gabe stood up, it revealed his cut chest again, so I immediately turned to the sink and began rinsing off my scissors. Oh, Lord, he’d been working out more than usual. I washed hair off my scissor blades furiously. If sexual tension were soap, my cutting equipment would be the most sanitary tools on the face of the earth.

“Looks fine,” Gabe called from the bathroom. “Hey, I thought we should finish the conversation we started a while back. You know, since we’re alone, and all.”

My stomach hardened, then sank to the bottom of my feet like a stone. I drew a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “You know, you’re pushing your luck. A free haircut…Korean food…what’s next? Am I going to have to wash your car?”

He reached out and cupped my face. “Thank you for the haircut. I appreciate it. And for the Korean food, too. You’re amazing, Vi.”

“All right.” I shoved my hands into my jeans pockets so he wouldn’t see that they were trembling.

“Come on—let’s go in the living room.” He sauntered past me, pulling a shirt over his head, and I imagined a sexy guitar riff punctuating his steps. Leave it to me to put a soundtrack to Gabe walking.

He sat down on his couch, and I sat down at the opposite end. “What did you want to tell me about that night with Cameron?”

My lead stomach returned. It was time. “I need to clarify some things.”

Gabe turned toward me so that our faces were now just a foot apart. “All right.”

I closed my eyes. “I flirted with him. And everyone saw me doing it. That’s why everyone was talking about it at school on Monday. But I didn’t do it because I liked him. I hated him.”

He frowned. “Why did you do it, then?”

“I wanted to get him back for being so awful to me. I became so full of myself that year.”

Gabe nodded. “Yeah. When we went back to school after you lost all that weight, you did get sort of…”

“Bitchy?” I finished for him.

He pressed his lips together. “I was going to say snobby.”

My eyes swam. “During those first few weeks of our junior year, I became my mother. For the first time in my life, I was turning heads. The other girls at school hated me because their boyfriends stared at me in the hallways and, most of all, because I had the attention of the two most popular boys in school.” When Gabe’s face wrinkled up, I added, “You and Cameron Hakes.”

He nodded. “I know. You changed a lot that year.”

“When Cameron took me downstairs after we danced, I was ready for the game to be over. I told him that I wanted to go back upstairs and find you.” My throat tightened.

“Why didn’t you?” Gabe asked, his voice hoarse.

I bit my lip, pleading with myself not to let my tears spill. I wanted to get through this. Had to get through this. “I didn’t want to be with him. I…” A tear slipped out, and I swiped at it angrily.

Gabe brushed at the moisture under my eye. “Vi…don’t. I hate seeing you cry. Come on.”

I turned into his hand, closing my eyes and pressing my mouth to his palm. He sucked in a sharp breath and cupped my other cheek with his other hand. His head leaned close to mine, and when our foreheads brushed together, a spark shot straight down into my chest.

When he spoke again, his voice was scarcely above a whisper. “Go on.”

I sniffed. “You have to know. I never meant to hurt you.”

Without warning, Gabe stood and stalked to the kitchen.

“Hey.” I jumped off the couch and followed him, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. His kitchen was darker than the rest of the apartment, and it was hard for me to see anything but his profile against the window. I sat on the counter a few feet away from him and watched him. “What the hell? You brought it up, and now you’re walking away?”

He shook his head, not looking at me. “We don’t call it the forbidden subject for nothing.” He filled a glass with water and took a long drink, then went on. “It took me so long to get over what you and Cam did. The whole time you were in Utah, actually.”

It stung when he said Cameron’s name.

“You have no idea what that did to me.” He gripped his glass tightly in his hand. “And then you just disappeared to your dad’s house. In friggin’ Utah. Without saying good-bye or…or how about this: I’m sorry I slept with your friend. Nothing. Why would you leave like that and not tell me? Or my mom?”

I just sat on the counter top, picking at a frayed piece of my jeans. “It was no walk in the park for me, either.”

“Eventually I started talking to Cameron again. It took until Christmas break that year. He came to my house and apologized for…” Gabe looked like the words filled his throat with bile. “What you guys did.”

My eyes widened and I looked up. “What did he tell you?”

Gabe glanced at me. “Nothing. It’s not like I wanted to know the details, anyway. We’d never really declared ourselves exclusive. He told me that you were fair game. And eventually I guess I decided he was right, though I thought differently at the time.”

I cleared my throat furiously. “I considered you my boyfriend.”

He looked at me, only half of his face visible in the darkness. “Then why? Why’d you do it?”

My mouth opened, then shut, then opened again.

His eyes dropped. “By the time you came back from your dad’s I was past the anger. I just missed my best friend. I wanted us to go back to the way things were before.”

I nodded sadly. “I know. So did I.”

“When your mom came over to tell us that you were flying home, I made the decision that those couple of weeks when we were dating was ancient history. I packed them away in the back of my mind and promised myself never to bring it back up again.”

I watched him look out the window, his profile strong against the Seattle skyline.

“You came off that plane so different.” Gabe shook his head. “Your hair was purple and you had your nose pierced. You were a completely new person. There was something darker about you. Evasive and defiant. You snuck out all the time and tried to piss your mom off every day, and you’d changed your looks so drastically. It was weird.” When I didn’t respond, his voice deepened, anger visible on his pinched face. “I asked you, over and over again, what was wrong. I begged you to tell me why you were acting so weird.”

I nodded. “I know.” By the time I’d come home from my father’s, the vault had been locked, and the secret about Cameron was in it. I’d vowed to never bring that subject up again, and no matter how much he pleaded with me to spill it, my secrets remained mine alone.

Gabe’s eyes were so sad that I wanted to reach out and cup his face. Instead, I just sat on my hands. “I couldn’t tell you then. I’d worked too hard to lock it all away.”

“I never stopped, you know.” His voice was quiet.

My pulse stuttered. “Never stopped what?”

He gripped the glass tightly. “Never stopped loving you.”

I held my breath. My bones morphed into butter, and I was going to slide off the countertop and into a pile on the floor.

“What?” I whispered.

Gabe went to set his glass down on the counter, his eyes still locked on mine, but missed it by half an inch. It hit the tile floor with an ear-piercing crash and shattered at his feet.

I jumped off the counter, “Here, let me get it…ow.”

Crumpling forward, I landed in Gabe’s arms, which effortlessly lifted me up and placed me back on the counter. I realized that the bottom of my rainbow-colored sock was saturated with blood.

“Vi, your foot.” Gabe flipped on the light above the sink and peeled the sock off my foot to examine my heel. “Crap, there’s glass stuck in it.”

“Damn.” I grimaced, pain searing through my heel.

He turned on the faucet, pushed the hem of my jeans up, and swung my leg into the sink. While rinsing it under the cool water, Gabe’s fingers stroked my foot, carefully picking tiny pieces of glass out of the skin. “I don’t think you’ll need stitches, but you definitely need a bandage.” He reached into a cupboard and pulled out a small first-aid kit.

“Wow. What a Boy Scout. Always prepared,” I joked.

He glanced up at me. “Shh.”

I watched him in silence. Gabe finished cleaning the cuts, dried my foot off with a kitchen towel, then delicately taped gauze on my heel, stopping momentarily to chuckle at the sight of my freshly painted teal-green toenails. When he was done, he swung my leg back, then stood in front of me. It wasn’t until about twenty seconds later that I realized he was biting his lip. He reached over and flicked the light above the sink back off, leaving us in the darkened kitchen. And again, we were right back to where we’d been five minutes earlier. He positioned himself between my knees, and his fingers fastened themselves on my waist. My pulse raced, and my head went light.

“Vi…” Gabe sighed as he leaned toward my lips. I could feel the heat from his mouth on my own.

The sound of a key in the lock filled the kitchen.

“Alicia…” he hissed.

“I thought she was going to Whidbey!” I whispered back, covering my almost-kissed lips with my fingers.

His eyes were round. “I don’t…her plans must’ve changed.”

His fingers immediately jerked back from my hips, and he pulled away from me like a skittish animal, his tennis shoes crackling on the shards of glass still on the floor. I covered my mouth as soon as I realized that Alicia was the only other person besides me, who had a key to Gabe’s door.

Shame washed over me like a bucket of ice-cold water. I had a boyfriend. Gabe had a fiancée. What was I thinking? I hopped down, sidestepping the glass, and darted into the living room, where I sat down in a chair and conspicuously grabbed a magazine to flip through, my heart thundering in my ears.

The door opened, and Alicia’s voice called out, “Gabriel?”

My throat clinched shut, so I turned the magazine right side up with a stifled shriek.

Gabe cleared his throat. “Yeah, I’m here.”

She floated into the room and stopped dead in her tracks when she spotted me. When she spoke, her voice became eerily dark. “Working all day on your proposal?”

“Yeah, almost done with it. Violet came to give me a haircut, because I was getting so shaggy, and I know you hate it when I look shaggy.” Gabe was speaking too quickly. “Then we got to talking and watching the game on TV. Hey, how was your trip to Whidbey?”

Alicia’s cool gaze scanned the room: the television, which was playing a Spanish soap opera because I’d flopped onto the remote control earlier; Gabe’s work papers spread all over the carpet; the messy dining room table and discarded laptop; the chair sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor with a circle of hair around it; the piles of crumpled paper all over the dining room; the broken glass and blood on the tile floor; and, of course, my bandaged foot.

“Hello.” She said it to me through clenched teeth.

I had to make a conscious effort to lower my lids to a normal level. “I was just leaving.”

Limping over to my shoes and coat, I scooped them up without bothering to put them on. “Thanks for inviting me this morning. I think my dress will work nicely. I…” I racked my brain for something nice to say. Something to try and fix the mess I was undoubtedly leaving Gabe with. “I can’t wait to see you in your gown. It sounds awesome.”

Alicia’s eyes were filled with venom. “We’ll be seeing you.”

“Okay.” I opened the door and stepped out. “See ya, Gabe.”

Just before the door clicked shut behind me, I heard him reply weakly. “See ya.”