by Jolie Moore
Lucas’ smile was small. “Are you in cahoots with them in the guilt-making department?”
“No, it’s just that you might want to think about who you’re hurting on your quest to find out.” I fiddled with the wide rice noodles, watching them get cold, gelatinous, and unappetizing. “Have you considered that the circumstances of your birth mom may not be roses and sunshine?”
Lucas put down his fork, and planted his chin in his hand, elbow propped on the table. “Yes.” He winced a little. “I’ve thought about that as well.”
I pushed my plate aside. “I’m not saying it has to have been something violent or sordid. But maybe it’s the kind of thing that will unearth heartache a woman might try to forget.”
He pushed himself away from the table and stood. “I’m going to get something a little stiffer than water, if you don’t mind.” I heard cupboards open and close. A glass clinked against the counter top. When he came back, his glass held something dark swirling among the ice cubes.
“Tell me it’s not rum,” I said, trying to lighten the mood I’d singlehandedly tanked.
“Nope, not this time around,” he said, taking a healthy sip, but offering nothing further.
Despite the cool reception, I pressed my point nonetheless. “All I’m saying is that it sounds like you’re hurting the mom who put her heart and soul into raising you. You’re a tall, attractive, single doctor. Most moms would kill for a kid like that. And the woman who gave you up made a choice thirty whatever years ago. However she may feel about it, that choice was hers and it’s in the distant past. If you contacted her now, you’d be a very hard secret to hide.”
I took it upon myself to box up the remains and deposit them on the kitchen counter. When I came back Lucas was sitting on the couch, sipping at his drink. Avoiding the chairs that looked unused, I settled next to him on the sofa and watched dusk settle over the city.
Lucas put the glass, empty save for ice, on the table and turned toward me. “You look really nice.”
It was like the air crackled around us, charged with static. Not this again. I had already slept with him twice. All that sexual energy should have been used up by now. I didn’t expect there to be this remaining awareness between us. But there it was, filling the air. I didn’t move for a long second, my body suspended between fight or flight. Taking a deep breath, I looked him straight in the eye and played polite. “Thank you.”
I should have looked anywhere but at those eyes. He made no attempt to hide what he was feeling or thinking. He’d get eaten alive in this city. He’d look at a woman—all that want and desire in his eyes. Next thing he knew, he’d be looking for a second job to support the two million dollar mansion, designer purse habit, and private school tuitions a woman would heap on him.
But he wasn’t thinking about another woman. He was thinking about me. That was as plain as the nose on his face. He was going to kiss me. I had about five seconds to push him away, talk him out of it, give in. It was the last thing that I did because while my head wanted the former, my heart wanted the latter.
When he leaned in those first few inches, I met him in the middle. His touch, at first, was tentative. As if he were giving me a chance to get used to the smell and feel of him. One of his large hands cupped my jaw, the other pulled the clip from my hair. I didn’t know which made me feel more vulnerable, the tip of his tongue sweeping along mine or the feel of my own hair around my shoulders. I never took my hair down outside my own home.
His hands were in all that loose hair, molding my skull, pulling me closer. Guilt banded my arms to my sides. He wasn’t that easily dissuaded. A hand left my hair and bumped along my naked spine. Until his hand had touched my skin, I’d forgotten the halter had no back. With only a brief pause, he slanted his head the other way. No man’s mouth had claimed mine in years. I’d deliberately forgotten how good a man’s lips felt against mine. How the lingering sting and sweetness from his drink could made me heady.
His hand slipped further down my back and pulled at the bow holding the scraps of the blouse’s fabric in place. Heat seared my skin as his hands skimmed up my sides, near my belly button, tickling against my ribs. Lucas’ thumb brushed against my nipple. I heard a groan from him, and an answering moan that must have been mine.
All of a sudden my arms got very mobile and pushed against the center of his chest. The only sound in the room was the smack of our lips coming apart and labored breathing, mine and his.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do this.” The room slowly came back into focus. “This was such a fucking huge mistake, my coming here.”
Lucas took in air. I could see his erection straining against the thin fabric of his pants. “Why?”
“I’m not drunk enough for this,” I answered obliquely.
He stood, finally buttoning the shirt he hadn’t closed earlier. The shirttails covered the zip front of his pants, hiding his uncontrollable reaction from my view. He stalked through the living and dining area to the kitchen. He turned on the tap, pulled down a large glass, filled it, drank it, repeated the motions again.
I turned away from him, trying and failing to tie the bow. I’d used my dressing room sized three way mirror to do it the first time.
I hadn’t heard him behind me. “Here, let me,” he said, pulling the fabric from my hands. His touch was clinical as he pulled the cotton firmly into place. His hands grazed my shoulder and turned me toward him. “Why do you need to be hammered to be with me?”
“It’s not you, it’s me,” I punted.
He pulled a face appropriate for that crappy excuse. But I didn’t want him to feel as bad as me. “It’s the only way I feel like I’m not cheating on Andrew.”
Chapter 10
Lucas
10 Lucas
Great. I was competing with a dead guy. Talk about a contest I could never win. But I wasn’t dumb enough to say that out loud.
I stood and turned my back to Nari again, looking out on the parking lots and helipads that distinguished Los Angeles from older, prettier cities. I willed my erection to go away. I needed to think. Getting the blood back up to my brain would be the first step.
“Why did you come here today?” It hadn’t been to get laid, or even make out. It came to me now that nothing about her demeanor suggested seduction. I’d seen that side of Nari, drunk Nari, and it wasn’t here tonight. Not one tiny bit. I’d let my desire to be with her—sober—overtake reading the cues she was broadcasting.
I turned toward her, waiting for an answer. Her back was against the couch, her eyes closed. She opened them and looked at me. There was so much going on behind those brown eyes, confusion, hurt maybe. But through all that emotion, I still couldn’t get a read on what was going on in her head.
I repeated my question. If I hadn’t been looking at her, I’d have missed the quick flicker of her eyes down and to the left. She was going to lie to me. Taking a deep breath and bracing my hands on my hips, I got ready for whatever crap was coming down the pike.
“I thought we were trying out being friends. Sounded like you needed to talk.”
The “friends” word relieved me of my arousal. Grateful, I sat on the couch, making sure to keep more than a foot between us.
“Tell me about Andrew,” I said. If I was going to have a chance, I needed to know what I was up against.
Her face got that look again, like a light was shining from inside. Thinking about her dead ex took ten years off her face. It was like she lived in two parallel universes, the one with Andrew and the one without him.
“My senior year in college was the hardest of all four years. I was planning on medical school and couldn’t slack off like my classmates. Andrew had joined the Whiffenpoofs, so he wasn’t around as much.”
She paused, rubbing the empty space on her ring finger absentmindedly. “By December, we’d been engaged a couple of months, but Thanksgiving had been a disaster. I didn’t know if my parents would ever come around.”
Engagement, marr
iage. This had been more serious than some college boyfriend. I crossed my ankle over my knee. This was going to be more than I’d bargained for.
“After classes ended in December, Andrew thought it would be great if we could spend the weekend together before we went back to our families and faced a litany of questions about getting married so young. So he drove us to this little Westport Inn. It was the cutest little place. Anyway, I woke up Saturday morning to a surprise. Andrew had planned for us to elope, if I was game. My best friend Daisy was there. Russell Curry was there, too.”
“Did you get married?”
“Yep. Right there on the water. Everyone got dressed up and the Justice of the Peace married us that morning. We had a champagne brunch to celebrate. That weekend was our honeymoon. So when I went back home I had a little more ammunition than an engagement ring.”
I knew nothing about her parents. She’d never mentioned them more than in passing. But even my very liberal east coast parents would have been less than thrilled if I’d eloped in college. Joyce and Matthew had encouraged dating around, but not relationships that interfered with education. Marriage had never been on the table.
“How did your parents take their twenty-one or two-year-old daughter getting married?”
“I never told them,” she said.
“Seriously? Why not?”
“When I got home for holiday break, they were armed and ready. You could have filled a book with the warnings and dire predictions they had of my life ahead.”
“Didn’t they notice the wedding ring?”
“It was small, meshed with the engagement ring. And after they started in on me, I took it off.”
“To this day, you’ve never told them?”
Slowly, Nari shook her head. “I thought maybe during spring break, or after graduation even. Or…”
“Or?”
“Later, I thought they’d understand and accept him. But then in an instant I wasn’t married anymore.”
Nari rose and went to the windows. The lights of the city made downtown attractive at night. I stood and fiddled with my shirt. It took nearly everything I had not to go to her, lay an arm across her shoulders, pull her into a hug. She rubbed her bare arms. Goose bumps. Swiftly I unbuttoned my shirt and draped it across her shoulders.
She slipped an arm into a sleeve, and followed with the other. Nari came up to my shoulder. Despite her height, she was very slender. The shirt dwarfed her, hanging about her like a homemade ghost costume. I took a deep breath, then went for it. She was being unusually candid and I didn’t know if the opportunity would ever arise again.
“How did your husband die?”
Chapter 11
Nari
The word husband jolted me. Other than Daisy and Russell, no one knew we were married. But that’s what he’d been—my husband. Only the death us do part had come a little too soon.
In order to save my sanity, I’d relegated thinking about those days ten years ago to one day a year. But I’d had my day in March. After Hawaii, I had planned nine months of relative peace. Chancing a look at Lucas, I saw nothing but warmth in his eyes. No wonder the nurses said he had a great bedside manner. He could probably get patients to reveal all of their bad habits.
“The Spizz and the Whiffenpoofs had this tradition of traveling and performing at every member’s home town,” I started.
“I’ve been to my share of a capella concerts,” he said.
“So, it was Andrew’s turn. The group did a performance at Penn on Saturday night. I was going to go with him, but…”
“But?”
I’d been at the tail end of morning sickness. The mere thought of a three-hour car ride made me queasy, so I had begged off. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen him perform a thousand times. And I’d hoped he’d get somewhere with his parents. Not going to Wharton was one thing, but a marriage and baby were altogether different.
“We were getting close to graduation and needed to lay it on the line for everyone. Needed all four of our parents to understand that we’d chosen each other over everything else.”
But most of all that we wanted and needed our parents’ support. Marriage, baby, and graduate school weren’t going to be easy.
“But I wanted to give him some time alone with his family,” I said in an edited version of the truth.
“Okay.”
“Usually, the group traveled together, by plane, by van, whatever, but Andrew had driven separately.”
“Because he’d planned for you to be there?”
That had been part of it. But the other part was that I’d had my twelve-week ultrasound scheduled for first thing Monday morning when neither of us had class. And it had been important that both of us be there. We’d wanted to see the baby together. Though we’d both agreed it was corny, we’d wanted that stupid x-ray printout with an outline of our baby’s head, nose, finger, toes.
“So he made the three-hour drive to Olde Haven alone. He called before he left to say he’d be back at school by dinner time, and to wait for him. But six o’clock came and went. I tried his parent’s house, but his brother Simon said he’d left late, so I went to dinner with Daisy. But when I got back to his room at eight, he still wasn’t there. When I called his parents’ house a second time, the phone was busy. I started to panic. Finally at nine, they called Daisy. She walked over and we called them together.”
“How…”
He didn’t need more than that single word. His question was clear. “Drunk driver. Some woman had a few too many, got on the New Jersey turnpike. She had a Ford Expedition. He was driving a Honda. In the SUV versus car fight, he lost.” I reported it to Lucas clinically, like I was talking about a patient during grand rounds. It helped to speak about it that way.
Not in a way that mattered. Not in a way that had me thinking of crushed steel, broken glass, and blood. Not in a way that had me imagining his last moments. Was he afraid? Did he scream? Was his death swift or protracted? Had Andrew known that his life was about to end, that the proverbial light was about to go out? I felt dampness on my face. I pinched my wrist hard to end the thoughts before they spiraled out of control. Thought stopping was a technique I’d learned during my psychology rotation. Without cutting off this walk down memory lane, I truly feared a descent into madness.
I used Lucas’ sleeve to wipe a tear that was close to dripping from the end of my nose. In so many ways it was like the whole thing had happened yesterday.
The weeks after it were a blur. There had been a memorial at school, and another at his graveside in Pennsylvania. The Whiffenpoofs had sung at the funeral. And I’d cried and thrown up through the whole thing. When I got back to school and back to the doctor two weeks later, it was too late for a first trimester abortion. Not that I would have necessarily done it. That Catholic upbringing still had a strong hold on me even if I wasn’t a believer any longer.
Without Andrew, I hadn’t wanted to raise the baby, even though I’d been committed to giving birth to her. The idea of having a little one who served as a daily reminder of what I’d lost made me crazy. But the only alternative I could come up with was adoption. That semester I only had two goals, graduate without flunking out, and find parents for our child.
I didn’t know when Lucas had put his arms around me, but one minute I was standing at the window, the view blurred. And the next minute, I was soaking his blue cotton tank with my tears.
“I’m so very sorry,” he said. I could feel his chest vibrating with the words.
Pulling back a little, I looked up at him. His throat was working as his eyes locked with mine. I pushed a curl behind his ear. With a single finger, I traced his jawline. It scraped over weekend stubble. Even from here, I could smell him. It was the same scent I’d briefly caught a whiff of in the office, in his bedroom, from his shirt. But now he was in high definition. Musk, menthol, and citrus filled my nostrils. My pinkie continued its bumping—down over his Adam’s apple, clavicle, and landing against his pectoral.<
br />
Rising and falling, rising and falling, his chest moved under my hand. The ribbing of the tank followed his narrowing torso to the top of his greenish-gray pants. Giving in to my curiosity, I molded my hands on those little indentations between abdominal muscle and the ilium bone.
Lucas gathered my hands in his, stopping their exploration.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice a rough burr.
“I thought it was obvious,” I said. I shrugged off his button down shirt. We both watched it fall to the polished wood floor in a heap of starched cotton. Reaching behind, I pulled both ends of my halter’s perfectly tied bow a second time. Never taking my eyes from his, I flicked the two buttons at the top and lifted the starched cotton over my head.
Cool air swirled around my chest. Lucas’ gaze zeroed in on my nipples. I could feel them tightening.
His hands hanging loosely at his sides tightened into fists as he fought what was happening between us. I picked up his right hand, uncurled his fingers and laid the open palm against my left breast.
“This isn’t a good idea,” he hissed through his teeth.
“I think it’s a very good idea,” I said, picking up his other hand and doing the same.
“I’m not Andrew,” he said.
Pulling his head toward mine and brushing his lips with mine, I said, “I know very well who you are.” Then I kissed him. Brushing each of his palms over a nipple, he left my breasts and pulled me to him. He walked me backwards, kissing me all the time.
When we got to his bedroom, I had on nothing more than my underwear. He’d lost his own pants along the way.
Standing by the bed, Lucas took in gasps of air, as if trying to regain his equilibrium. I didn’t want him to have control. His tank top went next. I used my lips and tongue to follow the lifted shirt hem, through the whorls of hair to his nipples, which seemed as sensitive as mine if his gasp was anything to go by. With one index finger, I hooked on the side of his waistband, and the other index finger spanned his waist until I had a good grip on his boxers. And with a single forceful tug, his erection sprang free.
