To retaliate, she asked suddenly, “What did you and Celina quarrel about?”
“Celina and I? When?”
“The spring of your junior year. Why did she go to El Paso for the summer and start dating my father?”
“Maybe she needed a change of scenery,” he said flippantly.
“Did you know how much your best friend loved her?”
His goading grin vanished. “Did Junior tell you that?”
“I knew before he told me. Did you know, at the time, that he loved her?”
He rolled his shoulders forward in a semblance of a shrug. “Nearly every guy in school—”
“I’m not talking about infatuation with a popular girl, Reede.” She grabbed his shirtsleeve to show just how important this was to her. “Did you know how Junior felt about her?”
“What if I did?”
“He said you would have killed him if he’d tried anything with her. He said you would have killed them both if they had betrayed you.”
“A figure of speech.”
“That’s what Junior said, too, but I don’t think so,” she said evenly. “There were a lot of passions stirring. Your relationships with each other were overlapping and complex.”
“Whose relationships?”
“You and my mother loved each other, but you both loved Junior, too. Wasn’t it a love triangle in the strictest sense of the word?”
“What the hell are you talking about? Do you think Junior and I are a couple of queers?”
Unexpectedly, he grabbed her hand and flattened it against his fly. “Feel that, baby? It’s been hard more than it’s been soft, but it’s never been hard for a fag.”
Stunned and shaken, she pried her hand away, subconsciously rubbing the palm of it against her thigh, as though it had been branded. “You have a redneck mentality, Sheriff Lambert,” she said, supremely agitated. “I think you and Junior love each other the way Indian blood brothers do. But you’re competitive, too.”
“I don’t compete with Junior.”
“Maybe not consciously, but other people have pitted you against each other. And guess which one of you always came out on top? You. That bothered you. It still does.”
“Is this more of your psychological bullshit?”
“It’s not just my opinion. Stacey mentioned it the other night, and not at my prompting. She said people always compared the two of you, and that Junior always came in second.”
“I can’t help what people think.”
“Your competitiveness came to a head over Celina, didn’t it?”
“Why ask me? You’ve got all the answers.”
“You had the edge there, too. Junior wanted to be Celina’s lover, but you actually were.”
A long silence followed. Reede regarded her with the concentration of a hunter who finally has his quarry in the cr
oss hairs. The sunlight streaming through the blinds glinted in his eyes, on his hair, on his eyebrows, which were slanted dangerously.
Very quietly, he said, “Good try, Alex, but I’m not admitting anything.”
He tried to move away then, but she caught his arms. “Well, weren’t you her lover? What difference does it make if you say so now?”