Man, she had really hoped that Cash would make some kind of a move, even though she didn't want him to.
MOONLIGHT
Casimir paced the hallway, looking at the framed paintings of pottery and landscapes but not really seeing them.
From the first moment he had met her, he had always known that Rox was married.
The first time she had walked into his office to discuss a contract, he had seen the rings on her left hand, and so he had known that he had to leave her alone. To not leave her alone would be to cause heartache.
But he hadn't.
Casimir unlocked the French doors and walked out onto the deck, shutting the door behind him lest the cats get out. A wedge of moonlight sparkled on the ocean waves. The surf roared and pounded its fury on the rocks far below.
He had let himself get too attached to her, first depending on her at work, then becoming too friendly, too open with her, then insisting on rescuing her and her cats when just finding them a hotel would have been the more professional option, and then asking her to stay with him while he recovered because he couldn't fathom letting even anonymous nurses see him when he was hurt, and now this.
He was an idiot who had fallen in love with a married woman.
Years ago.
Of course, she had rejected him.
It had nothing to do with the fact that his face was all twisted up again.
Except that the echoes in his head made it all about that.
He had been shoving those whispers down all day.
Somehow, at night, in the dark and the silence when everyone around for miles was asleep, everything seemed worse.
The bandage itched on his face where his beard was growing out. Once the five o'clock shadow poked out of his skin, that stupid gauze pad scratched at him. Before that, the tape itched when he smiled, or talked, or twitched, or anything.
He peeled the bandage from his face and crumpled it up, dropping it in a flowerpot that he used as a trashcan out there. Cool air touched his face, and he ran his fingers over the tight skin. The stiff scar tissue felt hauntingly familiar.
Behind him in the night, the French door clicked and scraped, discernible even over the ocean crashing against the shore.
He heard Rox ask, "Cash?"
Ah, crap. Right when he had ripped off the damn bandage. That gnarled skin on his cheek itched, and he pressed his hand over the monstrous scar.
It was too dark for her to see him, and he would just keep that side of his face turned away from her. "I'm just looking at the moon."
In the ghostly moonlight, he could just see the outline of her as she leaned on the railing beside him. "I know. I trust you."
He almost laughed aloud. Well played.
He said, "I think we should find you a house tomorrow. I can help with a down payment or whatever you need. I appreciate that you stayed here while I needed someone to take care of me."
"Anytime, buddy. I can find a place. Don't worry yourself."
He looked over the dark sea, the roaring wavelets crested with silver glimmers. His house would echo with her and the cats gone. Maybe he could convince her to leave Pirate with him. "I think we managed to behave admirably, when you think about it. Two healthy adults, cooped up in a house. It's a good thing you're married. Otherwise, unspeakable things might have happened."
"Yeah." Moonlight touched her hair, drifting tendrils around her face in the night sea breeze.
He said, "I apologize for the unspeakable things that did happen."
"Cash, nothing happened. It was just a little slip."
"Your husband travels a lot. We're together a great deal."
"That's true."
He gripped the deck's safety rail. "I have a question. Please don't take offense. I haven't."
"Man, Cash. That sounds ominous." Her light voice sounded like she was joking.
His hands tensed on the thick wood railing. "Are you trying to create a reason to divorce him? Women have used me for this before. An affair is a perfect excuse to divorce someone whom you desperately want to."
Her sharp gasp shamed him. "No! Good Lord, I would never do something like that."
He hadn't thought that she would, and yet, something was tangibly different between them. "We've been friends for a long time, three years. We've never ‘slipped' before."
"We've never been cooped up together like this before."
"We travel together all the time. This is different."
Rox fidgeted, shifting from one foot to the other and scratching at the wood on the rail.
She said, "I'm not married."
A blast of cold, night air shoved him backward, and he straightened, holding onto the rail in case his knees failed him.
He couldn't breathe. He couldn't see or feel the rail under his hands.
He didn't care if she was lying now.
Carefully, in case he had misheard and to keep his voice from shaking, he asked, "I beg your pardon?"
CHANGE OF HEART
Rox stared at the cubic zirconia and plastic rings on her hand, seeing just a pale glitter in the dark night. The clear crystal caught a scattering of the moon's rays. The rest of the night was dark around them except for a few dim lights shining out of the French doors from inside the house.
Cash had turned toward her.
It actually felt good to get it off her chest. She wasn't a cheater. She didn't like that Cash must have thought she was cheating on her fictional husband.
She said, "I'm not married. Never been married. I bought these at a department store for twenty bucks the first day I was hired at the law firm."
"You're not married?" he asked.
"Nope."
"Then who is Grant?"
She pulled out her cell phone and squinted against the sudden glare, flipping through her links until she found the one for her friend's talent agency. She held it out to Cash, who had stepped back and away from her, away from the light shining from the screen. "A figment of my imagination and some headshots. I think his name is Lorenzo something." Lancaster Knox, actually. It was written on the bottom of his headshot. She might have googled him once or twice. And found the gossip sites that talked about whom he was really dating and maybe followed him on Twitter, where he posted mostly naked selfies daily.
Cash stared at her phone. The light glared off the underside of his face in the night, and he angled his body and face away from her. He must be hiding that bandage again. "He's a model."
"Yeah. If you're going to be fake-married, you might as well be fake-married to someone hot."
"And the pictures of the two of you on vacation?
"Photoshop. Took ten minutes."
"Are you poking fun at me?"
"Nope." She dragged the rings off her finger and threw them into the surf far below. "Just cheap fakes."
"Do you have a boyfriend?"
"Not for about ten months."
"Then why?" His voice rose.
"So that we could work together. So that you wouldn't bump and dump me like all the others. Because then I'd crawl off into a hole somewhere."
"And you did all that because you wanted to prevent any possibility of a relationship with me."
"It doesn't really matter, anyway. You're a heartbreaker, not a chubby chaser."
"A what?" His voice actually cracked that time.
"A chubby chaser. You can have any girl you want, and you certainly have every girl that you want. But you don't have to feel guilty or ashamed about what happened between us. It was just once, it doesn't mean that you're stuck with me, and it wasn't cheating because I'm not married. But don't worry. I won't tell anyone. I'll tell people that you were a perfect gentleman the whole time I was here."
She saw Cash moving out of the corner of her eye before he grabbed her arm and spun her toward him.
He wrapped his arm around her waist. In the near-total blackness of the night, she thought that he might have taken that bandage off his face.
He growled, "You swear that you're not married."
"I'm not married," she said. "I have never been married."
"Do I revolt you? Am I so hideous that you can't stand to touch me? Is that why you don't want anyone to know about us?"
He sounded so angry that Rox couldn't even laugh, even though that question was patently insane. "Are you kidding me? You, hideous? You're Cash Amsberg. Wren wrote a sonnet to your abs. People take pictures when you're playing volleyball without a shirt on and pass them around. You have a fan page on the internet."
"I do not," he said.
"Uh, yeah you do. ‘Cash on Demand.' You have twenty thousand likes."
Pale moonlight touched his cheekbone and jaw line. "You didn't answer the question. What about you?"