Better Than You (The Walker Family Series Book 3) (9 page)

11
.

H
ow was this happening? “Mike, wait!” Delta called as he walked away from her. In the middle of a crowded department store decked with tinsel, a nametag pinned to her cream cardigan, she was nevertheless back in high school. Only, she’d never
cheated
on anyone in high school…though that might have been less controversial than what had actually happened.

“Is that him?” Greg asked.
He’d come into the store more wound-up than she’d ever seen him. He wasn’t even this out of breath during sex. “Is it?” he demanded, and made a grab for her wrist that she evaded.

“What if it is?” His visit and his intent to
win her back weren’t welcome. His passion was too late, his indignation laughable. He didn’t love her and both of them knew it; his lawyer need for victory had brought him here, and not any true feelings for her. At least, that’s what Delta thought. The flush spreading up his neck from the collar of his shirt was tweaking at her guilt again. “Are you going to get in a fistfight with him?” she challenged.

His shoulders gave a sharp jerk as he straightened the halves of his jacket.
“Maybe.”

“Oh, for the love of…” Delta put her back to him and stepped out from between the belt racks. She tripped over a bouquet of red roses and kept going
. Mike was already at the main doors, a dark silhouette against the incoming autumn sunlight. She’d be damned if she was going to yell for him in front of God and the jewelry sales staff and everybody, but she lengthened her stride till she was all but jogging, heels rapping on the tile. Mike went through the doors, the sun flaring, and then she did jog. Greg was following but she didn’t care.

“Mike,” she called again when she hit the sidewalk out front. “
Michael
.”

He was crossing in front of a white Mercedes and spun around to face
her; the driver threw up his hands at the delay. “I know you think I’m stupid,” Mike said as he came charging back to her. All the sharp angles of his face were almost sinister when he was angry, like he was now. When he stepped up onto the curb in front of her, she took a half-step back so she didn’t have to crack her head back on her neck to look up at him. “But I’m not so stupid I don’t know what’s going on here.”

“Actually, yes you are,” Delta said without any real malice. “Greg’s apparently still upset abou
t the break up, he came by to – ”

“Delta!” he said behind her, and she heard his dress shoes coming across the concrete.

Oh no
. Mike’s face was murderous and here she was between the two of them.

“Stop.
” She turned so she had a view of the two of them, one on either side, and held up a hand to keep Greg at bay. “Go back to work,” she told him. “There’s no reason for you to be here.”

“Sure there is,” Mike said
. “He bought the same buncha bullshit I did.”

“It wasn’t bullshit.” She swiveled her head between them, trying to decide who was more volatile. Greg was winning. “Greg, you know we weren’t going anywhere. So I went on a few dates with Mike. Let’s nobody act like I misled you, because I didn’t.”

“You
slept
with him!” Greg was almost shouting, his face redder by the second. “Forget
misleading
, Delta, that’s called being a slut!”

“Hey.
” Mike’s arm came up – to do what, she didn’t know – and Delta grabbed his hand between both of hers.

“Greg,” she snapped, “
go away
.”
Because I can not hold him off
, she added silently in her head.

But of course he stayed, and Mike shook her hands off like they were a child’s.
“Oh, no, stay,” he said with a cutting false smile. “We can swap notes, right, bro? Hey, when you put your tongue – ”

“
Shut up
!” Delta shouted. “Both of you, shut up!” The panic that had seized her at Mike’s appearance was quickly morphing into a general, frustrated rage with the whole situation. “You are both grown adults,” she bit out, glancing between them. “You have jobs and imported cars and we are not going to pretend either of you have been wronged. I wasn’t engaged to either of you – stop acting like cavemen.”

Mike turned his wicked pretend smile on her.
“Caveman? All of you stupid women – ” he shoved a finger in her face that she slapped away, which deepened the angry blush along his high cheekbones - “you always want us to sit in your laps like dogs, and then you chew our asses out when we fight for you.”

“You
– ” She bowed up, but he cut her off.

“Don’t worry; I won’t do it again.” And he put his back and wide shoulders to her and stalked across the parking lot toward his silver Beemer.

Delta watched him go with an angry knot in her throat, shaking. She’d forgotten Greg was still there until he touched her arm and she jerked away from him. “Oh, what? Now you want to
comfort
me?” she asked with a glare.

“If that’s what you need, then yes,” he said, and the pompous ass was completely serious. “You had your fun, Delta – sowed your wild oats or whatever you want to call it.”

“Oats?” she asked, voice getting high and acid-tinged again. “That’s what you think? I’m some spineless dumb twit who needs to…to…have some crazy fling?”

“Delta
– ”

“Go to hell,” she bit out, and started back to the door. “If you come back into the store, I’ll call security on you,” she tossed over her shoulder as she hit the airlock.

The sales clerks had abandoned their stations and were all peering over one another’s heads, trying to see if there was a brawl out on the sidewalk. They all leapt when Delta entered, their expressions guilty as their eyes fell to the floor.

“Did I authorize all of you to go on break at once?” she snapped, and heard all their shoes start across the tile en masse.

In reality, Delta knew she should have expected this; men weren’t objects to be juggled but she’d tried to do it anyway. Selfish, insecure maybe, she hadn’t wanted to turn away Greg in case Mike turned out to be too much of an embarrassing oaf. Which he was, really. He was totally uncouth and unashamed, he…

Her eyes landed on the red roses, their petals smashed and scattered across the tile, and she realized that the angry knot was really a big, choking, sad lump in her throat
. She crouched and picked up the flowers by their tissue wrapped stems, the prick of thorns feeling like a deserved punishment against her palm. The loose petals were velvety as she collected them between her fingertips, and by the time she’d straightened and was walking toward her office, she wished like hell she’d been more insistent in her chase. Or that she’d let Mike deck Greg. Something. She just…
wished
, empty and achy inside for the first time in a long time.

She didn’t have the heart to trash the roses, and left them on her desk.

**

“You can’t actually be depressed about this,” Tam said from the neighboring stool. “You went out with the bitch, what, twice?”

“Watch your damn mouth,” Mike said into his beer, scowling.

“Sorry.
” Tam snorted. “She was
delightful
.”

Double Down was almost empty, and Mike wished it was completely empty at the moment because his best friend was enjoying his embarrassment too much.

“Mikey,” Tam went on, “I’m ninety-nine percent sure she didn’t even like you. You came, you saw, you conquered – maybe not in that order – but you bagged the un-baggable. Be proud and move on.”

In any other situation, it was advice Mike would have given himself. But right now, he didn’t want to hear it. “You don’t know shit about women, you know that?” he asked.

Tam’s face went blank. He blinked, then threw back the rest of his beer and climbed off his stool.

Mike didn’t care. Did he have to tiptoe around the guy’s feelings all the time? What the hell did he even know anyway? He never dated anyone whose name wasn’t scrawled under the words
call for a good time
in Sharpie on a bathroom stall somewhere. Whatever hell Tam had lived through, he didn’t know jack shit about women.

**

Delta realized she’d read the same sentence five times before she gave up and closed her book. She set it on her nightstand and cast a forlorn look around her champagne and cream bedroom, the dark of almost-midnight beyond her window, the beat-up roses she’d brought home and set in a vase on her dresser.

Mike hadn’t called and she wasn’t sure why she’d even expected him to. But for some reason, she had – or maybe she’d just hoped – and the solitude of her bedroom was oppressive.

She stared at the opposite wall a long moment, chewing at a fingernail, and then in a sudden burst of stupidity, snatched her phone up off her nightstand and found his number. Her heart leapt against her ribs when she hit the call button and heard the other end start to ring…

But it kept ringing, and eventually Mike’s recorded voice came on and asked her to leave a message. She hung up instead and slipped down beneath her covers, staring at the ceiling. She would put him out of her mind, she told herself, pretend none of it had ever happened and enjoy a clean slate without Greg or Mike or anyone.

But a tiny voice in the back of her mind whispered,
Yeah right
.

12
.

T
am gave Mike two days to cool off, and by that time, the gothic horror that was his mother’s fleshless, blue-veined hands clacking knitting needles together like she was eighty-years-old had become too oppressive to tolerate. Her hair was coming back in uneven black tufts; she scratched at it occasionally through the paisley silk scarf that was wound tight around her head. She was between treatments, she was home, and the sound of her humming and the way she kept offering to make him food was a razorblade across his patience. Her presence made him itch, and that left him so guilty he couldn’t stand to look at himself in the mirror. So after Melinda’s fifth insistence that she was and would be fine, he left the apartment and it felt like his car took him to Buckhead and Mike’s townhouse without any input from him.

Mike wasn’t home from work yet, but the drive wasn’t empty; there was a red Volvo sitting in front of the one-car garage, its driver leaning back against the trunk with arms folded and long legs crossed at the ankles. She was in a long wool coat that came just to the hem of her skirt, her dark hair streaming away from her head in the wind. Delta was, he had to admit, tailor-made for the pages
of a Victoria’s Secret catalog, but it wasn’t admiration that rolled his stomach over when he parked along the curb and climbed out. Mike was right; he didn’t know shit about women…at least not this kind. All their coy pretend smiles and cutting glances, the deliberate posturing and pouting – he’d never had an ounce of patience or respect for that bullshit.

He shoved his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket as he approached the sidewalk, eyes on the door, intending to ignore her, but Delta peeled away from her car.

“Wait,” she said, and when he didn’t, her heels clipped up the walk behind him. “Tam.”

He wasn’t going to wait for her, but he had to get his keys out and let himself in the townhouse, so the waiting happened, and she caught up with him.

“Tam.” When she reached out and laid a manicured hand on the sleeve of his jacket, he was stunned he didn’t turn to stone. He spared her a glance and her sculpted dark brows were pulled together, the smooth, elegant lines of her face tweaked with stress.

“What?” he asked, doing his best Jordan dead-face
impersonation.

“Is Mike coming home tonight?” S
he sounded almost, if he believed it, upset. Sad or stressed or something.

“Supposed to be.”
He fitted the key in the deadbolt and turned it, moved on to the knob.

“How soon?
I need to talk to him and he won’t take any of my calls.”

“Yeah, well, usually, when you embarrass the shit out of somebody, they stop taking your calls.” The door opened and he wanted nothing more than to step inside and slam it in her face. Instead, he pegge
d her with a frown and asked, “Why do you ‘need’ to talk to him?”

“I just do.
” her tone was pleading. “Can I come in and wait for him?”

He wasn’t going to tell her ‘no’ – it was cold and she was Mike’s business, not his, and he wasn’t that big of an asshole – but he was going to make her work for it. “I
dunno. Can you keep from being a bitch?”

Her eyes narrowed,
almost amber in the late sunlight. “Can you?” she fired back, and Tam decided arguing with her wouldn’t be any fun.

“Whatever,” he muttered, and waved her in after him.

**

Delta guessed that a casual observer would say she and her best friend Regina were nothing alike in l
ooks or personalities; but they at least
complemented
one another. Tam wasn’t just Mike’s opposite; he was a dreadful little shit. As she unbuttoned her coat and unwound her scarf in the living room, she watched the wannabe skateboarder dig his keys and wallet out of his pockets, drop them on the coffee table, and throw himself down on the sofa and grab for the remote. He couldn’t even bring himself to feign politeness.

“Can I have some water?” she asked as she draped her coat over the back of a chair.

He pointed to the kitchen without taking his eyes off the TV.

Dreadful little
shit
, she thought again and walked around the half-wall into the kitchen. She found a pack of bottled water in the fridge and took one, eyes doing a sweep of the room as she took her time unscrewing the cap.

There were a half a dozen
Far Side
cartoons taped to the black plastic sides of the stainless fridge, and a calendar that appeared to be marked with Mike’s workout routine:
cardio, weights, cardio, plyo…
etc. A neat stack of takeout menus on the counter and the barren fridge shelves told her he didn’t cook often if at all, and probably not well at that.

Struck by an idea, she found his pantry, a box of Duncan Hines brownie mix, and then launched a full-scale expedition for the rest of her ingredients. There was a casserole dish in a lower cabinet that would serve, and he had plenty of eggs. Olive oil from the pantry would have to replace the Crisco the box called for, but it would work. Smiling to herself, Delta lined everything up on the counter and pushed up the sleeves of her white poplin shirt.

She was stirring the wet ingredients into the dry with spoon and mixing bowl when Tam called, “What the hell are you doing in there?” from the other room.

“Making brownies,” she called back, and the TV was muted.

“What?” he asked.

“Brownies,” she said in a sugary sweet voice. “And the secret ingredient is bitchiness.”

Sound resumed on the TV and she kept working. When they were in the oven and she’d washed and put away the dishes she’d used, she went to sit on the loveseat across from Tam, not missing the guarded, curious look he fired her.

“Actual brownies?” he asked after a long moment, and something akin to hopefulness came alive in his face.

Inexplicably, her snarky retort died on the end of her tongue. Without his frown, other lines became visible around his eyes and mouth, a stress that was amplified in the wild, almost childlike fire moving around in his blue eyes. She didn’t know if it was fright or fury or maybe both, but it was something deep-seated and long-held, something he probably didn’t even know he projected. It left her a little bit frightened, and very curious.

“Yes,” she said carefully. “They’ll be done in about twenty minutes.”

His eyes – too bright and boiling over with unhappy energy – went to the TV and then came back to her. He shrugged and reached up to pull at the thick spikes of hair across his forehead. “Guess I’ll grab a shower, then.” When he got to his feet, the frown had returned, but Delta had seen what was beneath it and wasn’t fooled when he shot her a look that suggested she not misbehave in his absence.

She frowned back and listened to his sneakered feet go down the foyer, up the stairs, across the hall. When the water cut on, pipes groaned somewhere in the walls.

When she figured it safe, she went around the coffee table and took his seat, gaze falling on the wallet he’d left behind. She told herself she wanted to know his full name in case she ever had to give it to the police – because he had that look about him – but she was gripped with good old fashioned nosiness too, as she picked up the wallet and flipped it open.

There were a half a dozen ten dollar bills and a few ones in the cash sleeve.
Two credit cards. A CVS customer card. A ticket stub from an AC/DC concert in ’08. He looked shell-shocked in his license photo, but she couldn’t read his info because the plastic sleeve was scratched and cloudy. She worked a nail beneath and managed to slide the ID out.
Tameron Wales
, she read before something that had been tucked behind the license went fluttering down to the floor.

She leaned forward and took a corner of it between two fingers. It was a photo, the kind you’d get at a carnival photo booth, of Tam
sporting even longer hair and a girl on his lap. She was young, a dirty blonde, with a sweet little pixie face and huge eyes. Both her arms were around Tam’s neck and she smiled up at the booth’s camera as he pressed a kiss to her temple.

Delta flipped it over and read the bold, all-caps label handwritten on the back.
JOEY 2003
. Back to the wallet, she found two more from the same photo booth session inside the license sleeve. Tam was smiling in both pictures, the kind of smile that reached off the paper and told anyone looking at this snapshot of time that he’d been deliriously happy in that booth with that girl, whoever she was.

“What the hell?”

She jerked, head snapping back on her neck in sudden panic. Tam was standing on the other side of the coffee table, Mike’s sweats and t-shirt hanging off of him and making him look even thinner than he was. His hair was wet and pushed back off his face, and all that anxious, trapped-animal fire she’d thought she’d seen in his eyes before was roaring now. He was livid.

“What the hell are you doing?” he repeated, and she dropped his wallet, license and the pictures on the coffee table like they’d burned her.

“I…I’m sorry. I just…”

He grabbed for them wildly, snatching the photos and wallet to his chest like she hadn’t already seen them. Like they were something she
shouldn’t
have seen. With one hand braced on the table, he shot a glare at her that sent a frightened thrill up her spine.

“You don’t say shit about this to Mike,” he hissed. “Do you understand?
You didn’t see these
. They don’t exist.”

Delta lifted her palms in a
defenseless pose. “I won’t. I – ”

“Don’t say
anything
.”

“I won’t,” she repeated, too dumbfounded to even defend
herself.

Hands shaking, he fumbled the pictures back in the sleeve, slid his ID over them, and stormed out of the room with one last shudder-inducing glance in her direction. When he was gone,
Delta slumped back against the sofa and released a deep breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

I should go
, she thought.
This was a stupid idea
.

But there was a
click
as the front door unlocked and stupid or not, she couldn’t change her mind. Mike was home.