All I Ever Wanted Read online

  Her brown eyes narrowed. “Uh, yeah. Why?”

  “Cupcakes,” I said simply, trying to give her my most charming, innocent grin. “A guy I met at the opening ceremony told me they shouldn’t be missed.”

  She visibly relaxed. “Oh, yeah, they are good.” Then she took a deep breath and pointed diagonally across the large, crowded room. “See that red flag with the ‘A’ on it? The one next to the bright orange sign that says ‘Miss Muffet’s Curds-n-Whey’?”

  I nodded.

  “Abbott’s Sweet Confections is set up right over there,” she told me. “But, um, there’s also a great fudge booth—from the ChocoHeaven shop—and a table with caramel corn and another vendor who’s selling warm, roasted pecans with cinnamon and sugar, if you’re hungry for dessert. You can see those along the way by just following the circuit like this.” She made a counterclockwise loop in the air with her index finger.

  I nodded again. “Sounds good. Thanks.” Then I wandered in the direction she’d pointed me. The longer way around, I noticed. Hmm. Interesting.

  Sure enough, when I glanced back at the booth where she’d been, I saw the brunette making a beeline for the red flag.

  Women. Always having to warn their friends about the Big Bad Guys out there.

  Well, good. Let her warn Amanda/Samantha. I’d give her the time to do it. Wasn’t like I was going to be blowing town and leaving Justin in a lurch just because some girl I knew once might not want me here.

  Kinda hurt though. Still. That she’d lied to me about who she was. That she hadn’t called. That the cell number she’d given me ended up being to a pizzeria in the Cincinnati suburbs.

  “You’ve reached Molinelli’s Pizza Pie & Pasta. Can I take your order?”

  That was what I’d heard on the line. Not her voice. Not her laugh.

  But in spite of everything, I’d really liked her. She was pretty, yes, but it was her mind and her enthusiasm that’d hooked me. She loved music and poetry. She seemed to instinctively understand the beauty of storytelling. She was imaginative, and I could see us getting together. Maybe not forever, but again. At least once.

  Guess this weekend would be that one time. After three months of silence, though, I wasn’t expecting it to be quite as hot and heavy as the evening we met.

  I unzipped my jacket a few notches—it felt warm all of a sudden—and pushed back the memories of that night, walking on.

  When I finally got near the Abbott’s Sweet Confections booth, I slowed to a stop and studied the picturesque tableau for a minute. Like a painting in some art history museum. The curly-haired brunette from before was standing off to the side. There was a lean, dark-haired guy in the middle, idly poking at plate of brownies. And then there was Amanda. Or Samantha. Or both. A two-for-one special.

  Maybe no vampires were running around the town, but there might just be a shape-shifter out and about.

  She was holding her cup of coffee like she’d rip the arms off any bastard who tried to snatch it away from her. Like she needed it to get through the afternoon.

  Don’t know what it was about seeing her this way that made me so angry all of a sudden. Maybe because closer up, she looked really exhausted and desperate for some kind of defense against an aggressive world. Maybe because she seemed smaller and more fragile than I remembered, and I hated that my first instinct was to protect her. After all, she’d hurt me. Not the other way around.

  I took a few steps forward and said, “Amanda.”

  She swiveled toward me like one of those cartoon whirling dervishes, her dark, silky hair flying like a cape behind her with the highlights catching the light in random ripples. Her bright blue eyes grew wide with shock.

  Before she could speak, though, the lean guy with the brownies raised his gaze to meet mine. He shot me a confused look. “Who?”

  The brunette I’d talk to earlier glanced frantically between me, Amanda/Samantha, and the brownie guy. “Oh, um, hi…again. I was just telling Sami—”

  “Hi,” I said back, cutting her off. Then I turned to fully face the person I’d come to see. “Amanda,” I repeated.

  She took a shaky breath. “Alex. Hello. Wow, it’s such a surprise to see you here—”

  “You know him?” the guy interrupted, looking at me with an astonished—and not in a good way—expression. One might even describe it as unwelcoming. Who the hell was he? A boyfriend? Was that what she’d been trying to hide from me all this time?

  I crossed my arms, smiled tightly at the guy, and waited for Amanda/Samantha’s response.

  “Well…yes,” she told the guy slowly. “Alex and I met at a concert back in the fall and um…and we—”

  Long, uncomfortable moment of silence.

  “Got to know each other,” I finished for her finally. Then as a challenge to the dark-haired guy, I added, “Very well.”

  Suddenly, he was nowhere near the brownie plate anymore. He was standing right in front of my face, blue eyes iced over like frozen lake. “Are you saying you slept with my sister?” he hissed.

  I took a step back. “What? Amanda, you have a brother?” This was news. “Thought you said you were an only child.”

  “Oh, shit,” I heard her murmur.

  Had to wonder—was there anything she’d told me that was the truth?

  “Yeah,” the guy said, closing the distance between us again. “I’m Oliver Abbott. Sami’s older brother. And why in the hell do you keep calling her Amanda?”

  “Um, okay, guys. Can I just—” She tugged her brother back toward the table. “Maya,” she called urgently to the other girl. “Could you, uh, keep him here while Alex and I go for a little walk?”

  “Absolutely!” Maya said. “Go, Sami. Go now.”

  “We’re going,” she said, shoving me toward the Village Hall doors. Hard.

  When we were outside the building and safely out of hearing from the booth, she said, “Look, Alex, I’m really sorry. My name is actually Samantha, and I told you a lot of things that weren’t quite true when we—”

  “Oh, I know. I figured that out pretty quick when I saw you in town.” I stopped walking and looked down at her. Her skin was almost ghostly white except for her cheeks and nose, which were ruddy from the cold, and her lips… Mmm. They were rosy as well. And a little wet from her having licked them before speaking.

  Couldn’t believe how much I wanted to lick them too.

  Shit.

  I did not still like this little liar, no matter how cute she looked all bundled up in her puffy pink coat. A lost princess wandering around the winter wonderland as if in search of her prince.

  I was not that prince. Would never be that prince.

  Not my style to rescue anyone.

  And I’d be damned if I wore tights and some stupid crown. Literally or metaphorically. I wasn’t playing out anyone else’s fantasies.

  “You have every right to be angry,” she said.

  “Yep,” I agreed.

  Time to keep walking. I strode a few steps away from her, but she followed me. Even jogged a little to catch up.

  “Alex, all I can do is apologize. It wasn’t my intention to hurt you at all. At first, I was just trying to protect myself. You know, ‘Stranger Danger.’ Not tell a guy I’d only just met too many real details about my life. But then—well, it’s complicated.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “Yeah? Explain that. I like stories, and I’m not twelve. I can handle a complicated narrative.” I picked up the pace for a second so we wouldn’t get slammed into by some man with a firewood-filled wheelbarrow. “But I wanna hear the real version this time.”

  She took a deep breath and nodded. “Fair enough,” she said. “But can we slow down? At least a little?”

  I glanced at her legs. That was my first mistake. They were long and slender, but I still had half a foot on her in height. And I remembered her legs without the dark jeans. With just the soft, creamy skin showing. So touchable. And she’d let me touch her too. Not nearly as much or for as
long as I’d wanted, but we’d gotten a good start.

  I shook my head and looked at her feet instead, which were clad in these brown high-heeled boots. The kind that looked real stylish but weren’t meant for running. Or even walking for very long. Thinking of her—with her dainty feet—trying to catch up with me made me feel sorry for her again. And that was my second mistake.

  Still, I slowed down. “Fine,” I said. “Start talking.”

  “Okay.” She wrapped her arms around her body as if trying to steel herself against the elements—visible and invisible. “One of my college roommates in Cincinnati is named Janna. You met her briefly during the concert, but you probably don’t remember her—”

  “Blond hair, black outfit, unintelligibly drunk.”

  She stared at me. “So, you do remember…”

  “I remember everything about that night.”

  “Okay,” she said again, her breathing a little shallower than before. “Well, it was the ‘unintelligibly drunk’ part that was a problem. Janna is a, um, very social drinker. And she wanted to go a house party after the concert, but I’d met you and…well, I wasn’t ready to leave.”

  I didn’t say anything to that, but I appreciated hearing it. Given the strength of my own attraction to her, I’d been worried my judgment might have been impaired the night of the concert. My senses had told me then that the interest had been mutual. I’d believed it was. Never would’ve taken that next step otherwise. But given her disappearing act, I’d spent the past three months doubting my instincts, and I fucking hated feeling that way.

  “So, Janna came to find me to tell me she was leaving early, and she was already pretty toasted. You and I were just talking backstage then. I’d brought you guys some water and we’d chatted a bit. I knew your name from reading about the White Knights online, but you still didn’t know mine.” She paused. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure I was going to tell it to you either. I wasn’t some groupie type. I wasn’t looking to hook up—with you or with anyone. I just…I just liked you. And your music.”

  This slammed closer to my vanity than I wanted to admit. I remembered how she’d been all flushed with excitement and chattering dreamily about the songs. Songs I’d had a hand in writing. She’d said her favorite was “Dragonfly”—one of a few I’d written completely on my own. A brand new tune that wasn’t even on our band’s CD at the time. So I knew she didn’t know it was solely my creation. Knew she wasn’t trying to flatter me personally. And yet, she couldn’t have done a better job of it.

  “When Janna called out to me to say goodbye, she slurred my name so badly that it sounded a lot more like Amanda than Samantha. So I didn’t blame you for mishearing it then, or for calling me Amanda later. And correcting you on it seemed silly at that point. I didn’t think we’d end up talking so late into the night. And I really didn’t think I’d end up with you at your hotel room…” She blushed and went silent.

  This all had the ring of truth about it, but I wasn’t going to let my guard down with her again. I couldn’t separate the realities from the fabrications in my memory. The way she’d presented herself on that October night still stuck with me, like it’d been imprinted on my brain. I didn’t even know how to begin to reform my impressions. Which ones I should keep. Which ones I should discard.

  “Look, Samantha,” I said deliberately, “if your name had been the only thing you’d lied about, I could accept that. Even understand it. But why change your whole history? The details of your life? I don’t get that.”

  She stopped walking and turned to face me, looking almost haunted. “Alex, when you and I were talking at the auditorium, the only thing I was untruthful about was my first name. But I was being my ‘college self’ that night, and that person is pretty different from my ‘hometown self.’ Even though all of my Cincinnati friends know me as Samantha, they don’t know my nickname—Sami—which is what almost everyone calls me here. They don’t know much about my background either, but that’s how I’d planned it. How I’d wanted it to be.”

  She shivered, pulled out stretchy white mittens from her pink coat pocket, and put them on. “I knew going away to school would be a fresh start for me, so I was careful from day one about what I shared with my dorm friends and how I projected myself. After a while, I started to act differently whenever I was on campus, and with no additional lies or exaggerations needed, they all believed the illusion. Eventually, it became enough a part of me to be sort of real. So with you, I didn’t start making up phony details about my life until later. Until we were back at the hotel.”

  Jesus. There was an ego blow for a guy. She hadn’t started lying about herself until she was in bed with me… Fuck. “But why? Why start pretending then?”

  “Because by then you’d already formed an opinion of who ‘Amanda’ was, based on my behavior and my friends. She was confident, capable, sophisticated. A city girl who was comfortable in the big wide world. You’d just assumed I was from a large city. When we were talking backstage, you’d made some comment about ‘simple, small-town people,’ and it didn’t sound like a compliment the way you said it.” She shrugged. “So later, I told you I was from Seattle, not from anywhere around here, and I remember you seemed to approve of that. And I liked your approval, okay? For a night, I wanted to be the person you thought I was.”

  I grunted something back, but I didn’t contradict her about any of this. I probably had made a crack about small towns within her earshot, and she did project herself differently when she was in a metropolis three hours away than in this tiny township nestled in central Ohio. I could see that, even only having been in the area for a few hours. She was quieter here. Less confident. More anxious.

  “Then things got a lot more…intense between us, and I wanted to tell you the truth, but I kind of thought it would kill the mood to stop everything and say, ‘Wait, my name’s really Samantha and I’m from Abbott Springs—I know you’ve never heard of it—Ohio. I can’t bake to save my life, even though my family owns a bakery, and I’ve never been anywhere near the Pacific Northwest.’ So I didn’t say any of that. Besides, by then I was starting to think you’d prefer the made-up version of me more than the real one.”

  I studied her hard for a moment. Nothing in her body language said she was lying about this. She really believed it. Really thought superficial details like these might have mattered to me. And those fears were probably why, though we’d come close—so damn close—we didn’t go all the way that night.

  “You’re insecure,” I said, realizing the truth of it with a flash of insight.

  She gaped at me. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe…yes.” She crossed her arms and squinted her baby blues in my direction. “Look, I’m not proud of it, but insecurity’s not a crime or anything. It’s just—embarrassing.”

  I grinned in spite of myself. She was funny too; she just didn’t know it. But I wasn’t about to make her embarrassment worse by laughing at her. Not yet anyway. I remembered being amused by a bunch of her comments back in the fall, though, and didn’t think she was nearly as different in Cincinnati as she’d thought she was.

  “Okay, okay. We’ve established you’re insecure, and you have a college identity and a home identity. I get that. But why do you hate your brother?”

  “What? I don’t hate him! Not at all. What makes you say that?”

  “You got rid of him, didn’t you? In your altered self-projection. You made yourself an only child, um, Samantha.”

  She sighed. “No, it’s not like that. It’s just—it’s really hard sometimes to be related to someone so perfect for our family. Oliver’s like the living, breathing poster child of an ‘ideal Abbott’ while I’m so clearly…not. On the outside, maybe, I can pull it off for a while, but not on the inside. The weird thing is, though, I can’t imagine having siblings and not having Oliver as my big brother. So it was easier to create a fictional family where there were no siblings at all. Does that make sense?”

  Oddly, in a weird way, it kinda di
d. Not that I understood the sibling thing directly—I really was an only child—but I’d imagined a ton of other scenarios about my family. I’d lived my whole life making things up about them.

  “Only children of single mothers sometimes fantasize about what it’s like to have a totally different family construction too,” I told her. “I mean, I guess there’s a chance I have some half brothers or sisters running around somewhere, but that would require somebody to actually locate where exactly my dad is. And as far as I can tell, no one has, so…”

  I let that thought trail off and was surprised by her immediate reaction to my words. Her expression was telling—not pity, but compassion. A real wave of empathy. And in the face of being concerned about me, she lost some of her self-consciousness for a sec.

  “It must be hard not to know,” she murmured, reaching out to stroke my arm in a gesture of kindness, or maybe it was solidarity.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Then she seemed to remember herself. She got all girlish and uneasy and abruptly pulled her hand away. I wished she hadn’t. I’d liked the feel of it there. A lot.

  Funny, I’d never voiced that stuff about my dad to anyone before. Talking about all the childhood crap wasn’t something I was inclined to do naturally, and I’d avoided shrinks and priests for all of my twenty-two years on earth. Not sure why I chose her as my confessor now—someone who was younger and more inexperienced in life than I’d realized—but I never claimed to be rational about everything.

  We walked in silence for a while, moving farther from the downtown crowd, and I wondered if she’d steered us away from the townspeople on purpose. Did she want to be away from the throng herself, or was it that she didn’t want me to be within easy range of her family’s bakery? Or that hot-tempered brother of hers? He’d been an asshole, but I couldn’t blame him for wanting to protect his little sis.

  “So, your family’s really into baking, huh?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “Abbott’s Sweet Confections makes everything from wedding cakes to fruit pies to an assortment of breads, sweets, and pastries.” She rattled this off like it was part of some late-night infomercial. “And we have a local café that’s open seven days a week, year-round, if you want to stop in for a hot beverage and a tasty treat.”