“I still am,” Susan said, a little annoyed. The door to the hall was still ajar. Susan didn’t want to close it; the gesture seemed too much an invitation to stay.
“Come here,” he said, opening his arms. “We’re okay, right?” He smiled and his face softened and dimpled, and she saw her handsome favorite teacher as he had been, his hair to his shoulders, his velvet blazers and wisecracks and stupid poetry and she almost went to him. Because some small part of her still loved him, still loved Paul Reston. But the best part of her knew that it was bullshit.
Her spine stiffened and she took a tiny step back as he came for her. “I don’t want to play this anymore,” she said. Her voice suddenly sounded hollow and strange, not at all her own.
He stopped and let his arms drop to his sides. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“This is weird, Paul.” She lifted a hand and flailed it around the loft. “We’re alone. We can talk about what happened. So why are we playing the whole ‘It never happened’ thing?”
He cocked his head, an eyebrow raised. “What do you mean, ‘playing’?”
Yeah. Now this was fucked up. “Jesus, Paul,” Susan said.
He laughed, a quick, fierce bark, head back, face rosy. “Okay. I’m sorry. I was just having some fun. When did you get so serious?” He shot her a good-humored look. “You used to love role playing.”
“Three girls are dead,” Susan said. “Another is missing, probably dead.”
He walked to the door, closed it, and leaned against it, his hands behind him, resting on the doorknob. His voice and demeanor were suddenly perfectly calm. “I heard. Dan McCallum, huh? I never would have seen that coming.”
McCallum. She felt the hot sting of tears again. She still didn’t understand how McCallum could have done it. He’d always seemed so demonstratively fair. A pain in the ass, sure, but always reasoned. You never knew what anyone was capable of.
And Paul. She had seduced her teacher, and then blabbed about it to a cop. After she had promised him again and again that she’d never say anything. He probably hated her now. “At least it’s over,” she said.
He brushed the back of his hand against her cheek, and she was grateful for his kindness. “I figured that you might need some company. Let me make you dinner,” he said. He surveyed her kitchen skeptically. “Do you keep food here?”
“Just cans of artichoke hearts and peanut butter,” she said.
“Well, I can whip something up.” He gave a fancy little bow. “I can make a hell of an artichoke heart and peanut butter casserole.”
Susan glanced back at her laptop on the coffee table, longing suddenly for the comfort of her wine and her computer. “I’m on deadline. I’ve really got to get some writing done tonight.” She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the Pottery Barn mirror. There was the furrow again. Her wineglass still sat where she’d left it on the curio table in front of the mirror.
“You have to eat.” He looked at her expectantly.
She turned to him. “How did you know where I lived, anyway?”
“We’ve got access to Nexus at school. You can find anyone. Just by typing in their name.” Reston took a moment, as if considering his exact intent, wanting to get the words just so. “It was hard for me after you graduated.” He glanced away. “You didn’t respond to my letters.”
“I was in college.”
He shrugged casually and shot her a handsome smile. “I loved you.”
“That’s because I was a teenager,” Susan said, trying to explain. “I adored you. What’s not to love about that?” She walked over to the mirror and picked her wineglass off the table and drained it. The photograph that Bliss had given her the week before was stuck in the corner of the mirror. Three-year-old Susan holding hands with her father. Safe. Happy.
Everything changes eventually.
“I’ve never stopped thinking about you,” Paul said.
Susan looked at her reflection. “Come on, Paul,” she said to her own image. “You don’t even know me.”
He walked up behind her, his reflection serious and a little hurt. “How can you say that?”
Susan picked her wooden hairbrush off the table and began to brush her pink hair. It didn’t need it, but it gave her something to do. “Because when you knew me, I wasn’t a fully formed person. I was a teenager.” She kept brushing, feeling the bristles of the brush drag along her skull, the blood rush to her scalp. Her bearded father stared at her from the photograph, his hand clenched protectively around the little girl’s.
Paul touched the back of her head. “You were never a teenager.”
She put the hairbrush down. She did it heavily, and the brush made a snapping sound against the wooden table, startling her. “Look,” she said, glancing at her watch. “You have to go. I’m on deadline.”
“Let me take you out to dinner.”
She turned away from the mirror, from the photograph, from her father, and looked at him. “Paul.”