Once More, At Midnight

For a long moment, the girl gazed at Lilah with a little furrow between her dark eyebrows. “I didn’t know there was a real Ernie. I thought it was just a name. You know, like Burger King.”

“You mean, like Carl’s Junior?”

“Is he real, too?”

“I think so. Anyway, I know Ernie is real, so is he around? In the back, perhaps?”

Suddenly the furrow cleared. “Oh, yeah, the owner’s in back.” A bell dinged in the kitchen. “That’s my order. I’ve gotta go. Back in a sec.” She disappeared before Lilah could remind her to send Ernie out.

Sighing, Lilah turned and walked to the wall of publicity photos Ernie had hung by the front door. Gazing idly at the pictures while she waited, she leaned forward suddenly as she recognized the first picture she’d ever sent home. This one wasn’t a headshot; it was a reprint of a photo taken on the set of the only movie she’d ever done: Attack Girls From Planet Venus. The snapshot showed her and several other wanna-be starlets in scanty, strategically ripped silver attire. Lilah stood on the far right. Beneath her likeness she had written To Ernie, I’ll always love your milk shakes best. XOXO, Lilah. Then she’d drawn a star instead of her last name.

Lilah shook her head. She didn’t draw stars anymore. No one ever asked for her autograph, anyway.

“I didn’t see that movie. The locals tell me it’s a classic.”

The deep voice, low and slow and sardonic, made Lilah’s heart jump to her throat. She whirled around to find Gus standing mere inches behind her. Looming several inches taller and wider than she, he gazed over her head at the photograph then down again at her and raised an eyebrow with perfect irony.

“Was there a sequel?”

His presence seemed to surround Lilah, to press in on her, though there was a good foot and a half of air between them.

She stood dry-mouthed and thick-tongued as Gus’s prairie-winter eyes lowered slowly from the photo to her face. Not sure what to expect from him, she felt a thin, sharp stab of anxiety as their gazes met and held. In all the years she’d known him, she had never stood this close without feeling the almost electric energy that pulsed between them. It had been there ever since they’d both hit puberty. Today was no different.

When she’d pictured him over the years—and she’d be lying through her teeth to claim that she hadn’t—she had sometimes imagined him still in love with her and unable to mask the longing and youthful hunger that smoldered in his gaze. Once upon a time being with Gus had made her feel more special than she’d felt anyplace else.

Then there were the times in the past few years when Lilah could not picture Gus except as he’d looked the last time she saw him—with his eyes spitting sparks of fury and bitterness that had burned her soul.

Today if his eyes were a true indication of his feelings, he was long past the fury and resentment. Past the adolescent lust, too. In front of her was a man whose emotions were under his own control, and he looked at her with decided neutrality.

“The movie,” he murmured, nudging her focus. “Was there ever a sequel?”

“I hope not.”

He laughed at that. Easily. It was a sound she had not heard often from him. Even in their happiest moments and even though they’d almost always been alone together, away from the townspeople he’d mistrusted, Gus had rarely laughed. She remembered wanting him to, wanting to be the one to elicit a guffaw or two. Though she’d rarely been successful, she had challenged his control in other ways….

“So, what brings you back to town, Lilah?” The rich baritone, much deeper than she recalled, wrapped around her name. “Taking a break from the bright lights and big city?”

She looked for sarcasm and found none, but felt embarrassed nonetheless. Gus had no way of knowing that the brightest light she’d worked under in years was the plate warmer at Jerry’s Deli. “My family is here,” she said, striving for a matter-of-fact inflection, but to her own ears she sounded defensive. “I’ve been back many times over the years. Have you?”

She already knew the answer to that question, of course. She’d looked for him, listened for some clue to his whereabouts on most of those early visits home. But the only person in town who had ever kept tabs on Gus had been Uncle Harm, and he’d never spoken of Gus again after the time he’d called California to tell Lilah that Gus had been sentenced to one year in prison.

“My family left the area years ago,” Gus told her dispassionately. “I had no reason to come back until recently.”

No reason. Meaning she had not been a good enough reason. Lilah had always wondered if he’d ever looked her up.

Guess now I have an answer. Unwillingly, she felt hurt. As badly as they’d ended, she’d Googled him on the Internet lots of times, always warning herself to do nothing if his name came up, but never quite certain how she would react.

“Why are you back in town?” she asked. In high school, nine-tenths of their conversations had centered not on if but rather on when they planned to make their permanent escapes.

“I’m building my home and business here.”

“You’re going to stay…in Kalamoose?” Surprise teemed with the ramifications this news posed, and Lilah felt dizzy.

God really does have a sense of humor.

With her mind a jumble of oh, no’s and what now’s, Lilah felt an almost desperate desire to rush back to the table, tell Bree they were going to dine on Sara’s Cap’n Crunch after all and get the heck out of here so she could think.

Gus did weird things to her common sense—like obliterate it, entirely. It didn’t matter how wrong they were for each other, how overcomplicated and flat-out painful her life had become because she hadn’t been able to keep her adolescent hands off him; he was like a drug—she was forever yearning for him, even when her mind should have been on something, or perhaps somebody, else.

She forced herself to admit, albeit silently, that for the past twelve years she had unconsciously pasted Gus’s countenance over the face of every man to whom she’d tried to get close. She’d had other lovers, two with whom she’d honestly tried to make a relationship work. But she had never been able to give herself wholly, and she had not understood why…until the night she’d realized that the arms she’d felt holding her, the hands she’d imagined caressing her, belonged to Gus and not to the man she was actually with. Bone-deep loneliness had dogged her for years; in that moment she’d understood why—and why the embrace of a lover had been no defense against it.

The best, the absolute wisest thing Lilah could do for herself would be to stay out of Gus’s sight line. She had a life—two lives now—to put in order. Nothing good would come of continued contact with a man whose very presence had always ruined her ability to think.

She’d made too many mistakes in her relationship with Gus to believe they could pick up where they’d left off, and standing so close to him now, thinking things she prayed her face would not reveal, Lilah felt a traitorous bloom of red creep up her neck. She was trying to think of a polite way to excuse herself, to buy a little time so she could regroup before she saw him again, when he surprised her once more.

“I’m planning a large party in September,” he said smoothly. It was a comment so utterly uncharacteristic of him, Lilah wasn’t sure she heard correctly. In high school, he had never gone to a party, much less thrown one.

Now he gazed down at the girl who used to be his party and said with detached ease, “If you’re here in the fall, be sure to drop by and help us celebrate.”

September. Two months away. Lilah was no longer certain she should plan to stay in Kalamoose two weeks much less two months. Between her eyebrows, her head began to throb.

Say something, a voice inside urged. With her tongue feeling too thick to fit her mouth, she forced herself to ask, “What will you be celebrating?”

A satisfied smile crawled leisurely across Gus’s handsome face. He looked every inch the contented man and every inch a success—proof that America was still the land of self-made men and second chances—when he answered.

“My marriage.”

Whomp. Satisfaction hit Gus like a sock to the solar plexus. Confirmation, validation…retaliation. You name it, he felt it. And it felt fine.

He’d waited twelve years to see Lilah Owens swallow a bite, just a bite, of the shock and pain she’d fed him. The fact that their relationship was over a decade old and that her choices then could be blamed on youth and immaturity didn’t appease his anger. He was surprised the resentment still burned so brightly all these years later.

He’d had a counselor once—in prison—who had helped him work on the concepts of forgiveness and letting go. After his initial resistance to everything the man had to say, Gus had learned a few things. Unfortunately none of the lessons he’d taken with him managed to completely obliterate his resentment. Nonetheless, even he was surprised by the degree of gratification he felt when Lilah registered the news that he was going to be married.

First, shock sparked in the gray-green eyes. Then the arched golden eyebrows pinched as if the news disturbed her. Gus watched her and had to work hard to keep his own expression under control when jealousy streaked across her face, briefly but unmistakably. He hadn’t known he could still affect her. God help him, but the knowledge was rewarding.

Still beautiful, Lilah was close to thirty. One of the single secretaries at his office in Chicago had celebrated her thirtieth birthday on a Friday and by Monday had begun reacting to every marriage announcement with near suicidal grief. Perhaps Lilah was the same.

He’d already noted her bare ring finger. Some women chose not to wear a wedding ring, but he doubted Lilah Owens would be one of them. He imagined she would wear a rock the size of Gibraltar. She had never been quiet, never blended in. That had been his goal in school: to be so unremarkable that no one would pay attention to the son of the least respectable family in town.

He’d once thought Lilah wanted to keep their relationship a secret because, like him, she’d thought it was a special thing, too important to expose to the judgments of a bigoted town. He’d trusted her, one hundred percent.

Unbidden came the memory of the nights he’d lain awake in the barn where he’d often slept as a kid, gazing through the dark at the bare rafters and planning how to buy Lilah an engagement ring. He’d spent hours wondering if a ruby might be less expensive than a diamond, wondering how to get the money and where to buy a gem. In retrospect, nothing more than a fantasy for a kid who didn’t have a mattress to sleep on.

He could buy Lilah a hundred rings now, he thought as he stared at her, a blood-red, passionate ruby or a diamond whose white brilliance set it forever apart from the pale. But now it didn’t matter, not for her.

Schooling his features to reflect dispassion, he said, “What can I do for you, Lilah?”

“C-congratulations.”