Free Every Breath You Take by Bianca Sloane Page B

her office and coaxed her into renting a bicycle built for two for a bike-riding debacle down the lakefront one Sunday afternoon, which left her with a skinned knee and both of them smeared with needles of grass and streaks of mud and quaking with uncontrollable laughter the whole time. He packed picnic lunches for the park, invited her to his place at least three times a week for gourmet meals he whipped up himself, and called her for deep, probing phone conversations that sometimes tiptoed into the waning hours of the day.
    Before long came the “meeting of his friends,” the knobby-kneed boys with crusty snot crawling out of their noses, according to the discolored old photographs posted on Jason’s Facebook page. She’d never bothered getting a Facebook page—she didn’t see the point—though it did thrill her more than a little all the times he showed her the pictures he posted of the two of them, further solidifying their “coupledom.” He’d roughhoused with those boys as a kid and they’d grown up to be his trusted confidantes: Kevin, the lawyer and perennial bachelor; Chuck, an appliance store manager married with four kids; Pete, the mechanic who Jason said always seemed to drink a little more than the rest of them, who had three kids by two different ex-girlfriends and lived with his mother; and Ollie, the roly-poly accountant with an equally hefty wife and preteen son. They had gathered in the back room of a favorite restaurant to celebrate the roly-poly accountant and his wife’s joint birthday party, and Jason reported later she’d been given an enthusiastic thumbs-up from the whole gang.
    Meeting his parents for Sunday dinner had produced its own special brand of stomach-churning anxiety. She knew he’d introduced girls to his family before, but she also knew this was different and it terrified her. Would she measure up to those beautiful, brilliant girls? (She’d met one by accident when they were out to dinner once, bumping into her and her date in the bar. Gorgeous. Big muckety-muck VP at a bank.) But her nerves slithered away the moment his mother opened the door of their spacious, sophisticated home—outfitted with beiges and creams, family photos and stunning art—and beckoned her into the warm and raucous enclave where the men roared over Sunday football and the women squeezed around the kitchen island to gab about family,
Real Housewives
antics and current affairs, while children banged in and out of the house, alternating between a haphazard touch-football game in the backyard and climbing their beloved uncle Jason like a tree. Jason’s mother, sister, and cousin hadn’t pestered her with incessant questions about her background. Instead they stuck to polite, friendly inquiries about what she did for a living and what books she’d read lately, and, of course, telling embarrassing stories about Jason, who ambled into the room seemingly every five minutes to make sure she was okay. His father and grandfather had been suitably impressed to learn Ricky Scott’s daughter was at their dinner table, having been bowled over by “what a hell of an athlete” her father was. Instead of making her feel sad or weighed down by the legacy, for the first time it made Natalie feel good to see how happy her father’s prowess made people.
    She finally felt like she belonged somewhere.
    It was just another in a series of the small pushes that propelled her into being honest with him about her checkered past beyond the bits and pieces she allowed to drop from her mouth in cautious dribbles—about that awful night and the decade-long trauma that had ensued.
    And so she did.
    Buoyed by three glasses of wine and the way the moonlight was bouncing across his face as they sat on his balcony after attending a reception hosted by his firm followed by a late dinner, she allowed the dam to burst and all the water to gush out in a long, ugly torrent. As she talked, she couldn’t look at him, shielding her