Truly(31)

“You seem distracted.”

Allie managed a little laugh. “I’m always distracted.”

He smiled.

She remembered thinking, when they first became friends, that Matt had the best smile of anybody, ever. Totally open, it was a pure reflection of his unblemished awesomeness. His eyes, too—but these days, she had trouble meeting his eyes.

“More than usual,” he said.

She shook her head. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.”

“With the wedding coming …” He trailed off. Not a question, but an open invitation to tell him what was going through her brain. A promise that he’d understand, whatever it was.

And he would. Whatever she said, whatever she did, he’d be understanding and lovely—and God, how could she tell him how much she hated that sometimes? How impossible it was to imagine spending her life feeling like the bad one? The petty one, the craven one, the moody one—name a fault, and she had it. Not Matt, though. He was a better person than her by every possible metric, and damn him, he was even better-looking than she was.

His only fault was loving her.

“You’d tell me, right?” he asked. “If there was something really wrong.”

“Of course,” she lied. “Always.”

He leaned in to kiss her, and she kept her neck loose. She kept her mouth soft and welcoming. She muffled the part of her that had always whispered doubts about Matt and had resorted lately to dialing up the volume to a full-on klaxon ah-oooooo-gah noise every time he kissed her and she had to force herself to let him do it.

She had to work so hard to want him, and that was her fault. One more fault that Allie possessed and Matt didn’t.

When he said mmm and scootched closer, she closed her eyes and hated herself.

When his hand smoothed up her arm and cupped her shoulder, his thumb rubbing back and forth over her collarbone through her T-shirt, she hated herself even more.

She hated herself all the time, lately.

Something wet poked behind her ear, warm and insistent.

Matt placed his palm against Roscoe’s neck and pushed him into the backseat. “Damn dog,” he muttered. But he was smiling.

Always smiling.

Allie looked away, out the windshield, and caught a glimpse through the storefront window of someone tall, with pale hair. She flung herself from the car so fast, she startled Roscoe, whose claws scrabbled over the seat in his excited confusion.

“Where’s the fire?” Matt asked.

“May’s in there!”

Allie skipped over a small patch of lawn and burst into the store, ready to fling her arms around her sister and crazy-hug her. Or possibly shake her. She wasn’t even sure which, she just needed to touch her.

Born eighteen months apart, they’d spent their whole lives together, and it was bad enough that May had moved to New Jersey. Now she was involved in some kind of scandal, and Allie couldn’t stand being left outside of it. She needed May to tell her what was going on. She needed May to be here.

It was damned uncomfortable, being crippled by doubt a week before your wedding when you didn’t have your sister-confessor around to spill your guts to.

But when she scanned the entryway of the store, she didn’t find her sister. Just a long-haired man with a camera slung around his neck, chatting with the suspicious store owner.

Telephoto lens. Journalist? Photographer?

He couldn’t be here because of May. That would be too bizarre.

But then, so was the idea of May attacking Dan with a utensil, and Allie had seen that video footage with her own eyes.

She checked the bulletin board near the door. No new messages.

None yesterday, either. No calls. One piddly email that said nothing Allie could sink her teeth into.

The fist of anticipation in her stomach tightened, and she released a long exhale and headed toward the coffee. Coffee was the ostensible reason for this errand: Matt only drank decaf, and they’d run out. But honestly, Matt drank maybe three cups of coffee a week. Mom had sent them out because she was just as anxious for news as Allie was.

Allie had watched the YouTube video fifteen times at least, always wincing at the part where Dan—with his typical Labrador earnestness—basically called May ordinary and boring, when anybody with eyes in their head could see that she was made of awesome.

Or maybe they couldn’t see it. Allie had been forced to impose a news blackout Thursday in the aftermath of the luncheon when some dickweed sportscaster called May “plain” and Matt read a sports blog that called her a “Packers groupie” whom Dan had elevated to the good life. Allie had lobbed a slipper toward the computer—not hard enough to actually hit it—and took Roscoe and Keller for a long walk.