Free Masquerade by Lace Daltyn Page B

it into the garbage like your empty
sack lunch. It took me—” Her voice broke. “It took me forever to get over you.”
The lie didn’t come easy, but there was no way she was
going to tell Tony that she’d come back to Chicago to finally get past the memories of
him.
    The next lie would be
even harder. She walked toward him. “But I did,” she said. “You have no right
to come back into my life and turn it inside out again.”
    “I had to find you. I
love you, Beth.”
    “Damn it, Tony. Stop
saying something you can’t mean.” She hit him, her hand connecting with a muted
thump against his solid chest. Again and again she
pounded, and he let her. Finally, he pulled her into his arms and she cried all
the tears she’d thought long gone. Tears for a love
never meant to be and for a life never lived. For long minutes , she wept
against his shoulder and clung to him as he clung to her.
    When she pulled away,
Beth felt drained. All the emotion, all the love and the hate of the past
seeped away, leaving only a numbness that, even married to Steven, she hadn’t felt.
    She sank onto the couch and
laid her head in her hands, wondering how she was going to find normal after
this.
    She felt Tony squat in
front of her. “I deserve everything you said and so much more. I’m sorry. I should never have done what I did to you.”
    “Why did you?”
    He settled back onto the
coffee table and leaned into his hands, running them through his hair. When he
looked up, she saw the despair in his eyes and tried, unsuccessfully, to steel
a heart already opening to him again.
    “It started with Marci.”
    “Wrong,” she said. “It
ended with Marci.” The girl had tormented her throughout high school. The
taunts, innuendo, and whispered half-truths, mostly about Tony, could still affect
her. She glared at him. “You know she told me on a regular basis that you two
were an item, right? In explicit detail. Made it kind of hard to disbelieve.”
    Tony looked surprised at
that. “No, I didn’t.” He also looked unconvinced. When Beth tried to give him some
of those details, he held up his hand. “I don’t deny the possibility,
especially after what happened. Just, please, you had your turn. Let me finish.”
    Afraid that Tony was about
to validate Marci’s myths, Beth wanted to cover her ears and run screaming from
the room. She was due some answers, though. And it was
high time she got them. So she nodded, giving him
permission to continue.
    “She and I did have
something once.” He said the words in a rush, as if speed would dull the pain
of the knife he’d sunk in her back. “It wasn’t some
ongoing thing, though.” Tony got up and walked to the window, leaning against
the wall as he stared outside. “You and I, we were dancing all around our
attraction for each other. I see that now. Then, though, it seemed like you
didn’t really like me, at least not that way.”
    He turned to her, his
hands back in his pockets. “I wish I’d flat out asked you. It would have saved
us both a world of hurt.” He sighed. “But I didn’t. I didn’t tell you I loved you. I didn’t get up enough courage
to ask you to the prom. I didn’t do a damn thing. And
the night of the prom, when I saw you there...”
    Beth nodded. “I didn’t
want to go with anyone but you, but you didn’t ask. So I went stag.”
    “I didn’t know that. You
were standing near enough to Matt that, when Marci told me you were his date,
it was easy to believe.” His harsh laugh acknowledged the mistake.
    “I left then. Marci knew
how to get a hold of some whiskey, and she and I got stinking drunk. Well, I
got drunk. In retrospect, I think she was filling my glass much more often than
hers.”
    His lips were tight lines
as he reflected on the past. Beth knew she didn’t want
to hear what came next. “I lost the virginity I was saving for you that night,”
Tony said.
    Even prepared, she
cringed. “I—I don’t want to hear this, Tony.” She