Sinful Longing

“Watch it. You’re lucky I still ride with you,” Michael teased, as he unsnapped his helmet.

After a drink of water, Colin let the therapy continue, this time with words. Because he wasn’t done. The silt on the riverbed of the past had been well and truly stirred up tonight. “Michael,” he said, stripping away the macho bravado. “I still feel like shit for being friends with those guys.”

His brother got off his bike, resting his palm on the seat. “You’re not responsible. Your friendship played no role in the murder.”

“But what if I hadn’t been friends with Paul? What if I’d never known them? Would things be different?” he asked, letting the question hang in the air.

Michael dropped a hand to Colin’s shoulder. “Forget the ‘what if.’ Focus on the real. And that’s this: she didn’t find Stefano through you,” he said, his voice firm and clear. “She found Stefano on her own. She found those others on her own. Hell, for all we know she might have found them through her lover. The one thing I know for certain is she didn’t find them through you being buddies with T.J’s little bro when you were twelve and thirteen. That is not how it happened. But even if it had, for the sake of argument, let me ask you this. Who arranged for the murder?”

“She did,” he said softly.

“Who hired Stefano?”

“She did.” His voice picked up volume.

“Who planned a murder?”

“She did.” His tone was strong and certain now.

“Exactly,” Michael said, bending to the water fountain and gulping up a stream. As he rose, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

“But I’ve made the same mistakes she made,” Colin said quietly, guilt stitched into his voice, into his goddamn heart and soul. Most days, he didn’t beat himself up. But some days, he did. Some days he was consumed with the emotion.

Michael raised a finger and pointed it at Colin. “You didn’t do what she did. You made mistakes that are fucking forgivable. You made mistakes that hurt yourself. You made mistakes that a human being makes. You did not kill a man. You are not like her.”

Colin pressed his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose and exhaled, visualizing letting go of all this guilt.

Soon, soon, he had to say good-bye to it.

“Speaking of what ifs, have you ever heard from your ‘what if’ girl?” Colin asked as they loaded their bikes on the roof rack a few minutes later.

Michael shook his head. “Not lately. That’s why she’s a ‘what if’ girl.”

As they left, Colin asked himself if he’d be happy letting Elle become a ‘what if’ girl.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


Big dots of primary-colored light swirled in a speed race across the slick hardwood floors, as the music of the B-52s pulsed throughout the rink.

“All right, my crazy skaters, I want to see how excited you get when you go to the looooooooove shack.” The directive came from Elle’s sister Camille. Mic at her mouth, she worked up the crowds at the Skyway Roller Rink, where she was the manager.

A flurry of teens, sprinkled with a few moms and the regular crew of older skaters who still rocked out on the quads nearly every night, motored around the oval, picking up the pace to the popular skating tune. The song was an appropriate number for the conversation Elle needed to have with her little sister, considering Elle and Colin were having a “Love Shack” kind of relationship.

The getaway kind. The sneak-off-and-get together kind.

Or was it more accurate to say they’d had that kind?

That was why she was here: to figure out if she needed to cut things off with him. But she flinched from the mere thought of ending the sweetest thing she’d had in ages—their secret, sexy, wonderful affair.

“That’s right!” Camille shouted. “Skate like there’s glitter on the highway!”

Camille held up a finger and mouthed one more minute. As Elle waited for the upbeat song to end, she dropped her head to her hand, Marcus’s confession echoing in her mind. There was no way she could tell Colin about his brother. That would be wrong. It wasn’t her place. But she felt awful knowing this news was barreling toward him and that any day he’d learn he had a long-lost brother.

There was something so very soapy about it, as if she could be reading the crib notes to a storyline on As the World Turns.

The character of the mother becomes pregnant before the murder of her husband. The mother hides her pregnancy during what turns out to be a speedy trial. She goes to jail six months pregnant. No one in her family knows about the baby in her belly. The only one the wiser—besides the medical staff at the correctional facility—is her lover on the outside. The lover whose hands were clean of the crime.

Elle shuddered as her sister encouraged the crowd to “bang, bang, bang on the door.”