“You know that I know that life is about far more than looks, right?” It wasn’t like her to have these retrospective moments. She was facing the sun and had to squint to look up at him.
Squinting caused facial lines.
She wanted to not care, but turned so that neither of them was facing the sun.
“What’s going on?” His question was as pointed as he’d ever been with her.
“I don’t know.” She heard the brush-off in her words. “I really don’t, Michael. I just... I am who I am, you know?”
“Of course I do. You have no problem here, Kace, if that’s what you’re thinking...”
“No.” She shook her head. “It’s just, I hear myself sometimes, you know, like the first time we met...”
She cringed even bringing up that horrid afternoon. Her second class at the Lemonade Stand. Standing at the front of the room, telling nine battered women that their looks did matter. That if they did what they could to make themselves look their best, they’d feel better about themselves, which would breed confidence, which then bred strength. If they felt good about themselves, they’d be more apt to really believe in their own worth and then stand up for themselves until they were treated respectfully.
It was all true. All valid and important. She was helping women she’d come to care about a great deal. In a little less than a year, she’d seen two of those women get jobs, places of their own, and stand up in court and win.
“I was the one in the wrong that day.” Hands in his pockets, he shrugged, as if there was nothing to talk about.
He’d interrupted her at the beginning of her lecture when she’d still been talking about how much it mattered to take time to do your hair and makeup. To choose clothes purposefully for your body size and style. He’d suggested, quietly, in a completely Michael way, that she might want to consider where she was and whom she was dealing with before she started in on her beauty-pageant rhetoric.
She’d had no idea he was a volunteer at the Lemonade Stand—one who had financed the computer repair shop that now helped support the shelter and who’d started and still oversaw computer-skill training classes there for the residents.
“No, that’s just it.” She touched his chest, fiddled with the button on his black button-down shirt. She was naturally a toucher. With everyone. She stopped, concerned she’d offended him again. Her hands hung suspended in midair. “I mean, yes, you were wrong, but so was I. I’d seen you come in and it didn’t even occur to me to change my rhetoric.”
She’d been talking about the value of beauty, knowing that a man with a markedly scarred face was in her small audience. She should have shown more sensitivity.
She’d later found out that he’d shown up at her class on behalf of a group of residents who’d asked him if their reasons for not wanting to come to her class were valid. They didn’t think a woman should put so much value on her looks.
“And you were right, too,” she quickly continued, letting one hand land on his chest—as some kind of weird compromise she was making between life as she’d known it and life as it was. “We can’t help what we’re born with or what happens to us, and there are a lot of victims of domestic violence who have had what beauty they were born with permanently altered...which doesn’t in any way diminish their worth. Their rights.”
It felt good to speak with passion in real life, rather than just on camera. And odd and somewhat threatening, too. So many changes in the past year...
“I was completely insensitive to the fact that the idea of judging one’s self-worth based on beauty, or by making it about external looks, is as detrimental to some as a little makeup and hairstyling is good for others,” she admitted.
“But you were completely right, too, as I’d have known if I’d listened a little longer before jumping on my soapbox.” His grin settled her.
And got her going again, too, in a way she was much more comfortable with.
“No matter what we’re born with or, as you say, what happens to us, we still feel better about ourselves when we give attention to our bodies. When we do all we can with what we have,” she said, happy that her rhetoric had value.
She wanted to touch his face. Had wanted to so many times over the months she’d known him, but never so much as she did in that moment. Wanted him to know he didn’t have to tilt his head slightly to the side to hide himself from her view.
“I really do find you beautiful, Michael.” The words were all wrong. She knew it as soon as they spilled out.
He didn’t push her away. He’d never be that cruel. He just stepped back until her hand fell from his chest and down to her thigh.
“You don’t need to work me, Kace,” he said, a note of bitterness mixed with pity in his tone. If such a thing were possible.
She felt pitied as he looked at her.
“I’ll find your hacker. And I’ll find out why you appear to have been targeted for things you don’t do anymore. But I’ll do it because I’m under the impression that we’ve become friends. Not because you turn on your charm.”
Stung to the core, she felt real tears spring to her eyes. And blinked hard a couple of times so they’d leave before they showed. She was an actress—a good one—she could do calm and unaffected just fine.
With a laugh, she tapped his chest again, hoping it wasn’t out of a pathetic need to show them both that she was allowed to do so. “I’m not working you, honey,” she said with an obviously made-up drawl. And then, more seriously, “If I ever work you, Michael, you won’t know what hit you.”
What in the hell did she mean by that?
This whole stalking thing—not that she was anywhere close to being stalked—but seeing herself framed as the drunk she’d once been had upset her. A lot. She didn’t like that woman. Was ashamed of her.
Didn’t want her family to see her in that light.
She wasn’t that woman anymore.
“I’m sorry,” she told Michael. “I just... It feels kind of like someone is trying to force me to be the old Kacey whether I choose to or not...”
“I know.” He nodded. Didn’t smile. The look in those chocolate-brown eyes was kind.
She had to go. And let him get back to his life, too. It was selfish of her, the way she’d call and let him come running.
Her butt landed against her car when she leaned back rather than turning. “I meant what I said. I was not working you.”
He nodded.
“You’re a beautiful man. Outside and in.”
She saw his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed. Not something that she’d noticed before.
“I’m smart enough to figure out, based on your scars, that at one point, the left side of your face was difficult to look at.” She was staring him straight in the eye. “It’s not anymore, Michael. The scars, they show strength...” She shrugged. “I don’t know, integrity, somehow. Like you have what it takes to wear them well.”
She was a class-A idiot. Lacey had said, on more than one occasion, that she didn’t know how to let things lie. Always had to prod to the fullest degree.
But then, Lacey was a happy, newly married woman and stepmother partially because of Kacey’s prodding, so it wasn’t like her identical twin could complain too much.
Michael wasn’t speaking. But he hadn’t left her standing there alone, either.
“Okay, well, I have to get back to the city,” she said. Sliding toward her door, she spun and grabbed the handle, pulled, started to lower