by Megan Hart
We’d had plenty of houseguests. Though our house was smaller than many that lined Cedar Point Road, we had three bedrooms and a finished basement that could accommodate more. Most importantly, we had lake frontage, a small section of dirty sand beach and a small sailboat. We were also a few easy minutes’ drive to Cedar Point. James and I liked to joke that our popularity increased exponentially in the summertime, when friends came to stay and take advantage of myriad touristy things to do in the Erie County area.
The difference between those days and the current situation was twofold. They’d always been our friends, not only James’s. And I’d been working full-time. Houseguests are much easier to stand when contact with them is limited to a few hours in the evening. I hoped Alex would have gone off to another day-long meeting, but I couldn’t know for sure.
The simple fact was, I wasn’t sure what to think about Alex. It wasn’t so much anything he’d said or done as what he hadn’t said. Hadn’t done. He’d skated to the edge and backed off. Flirting, I could handle. But this was something different. It was something more. I just didn’t know what it was.
I forced myself into leisurely shopping for deck furniture we didn’t need and I didn’t want. I tested bamboo chairs for comfort and matching tables for sturdiness. I looked at sets of grill tools, shiny and new, complete with carrying cases. I told myself I didn’t mind or care that James had opened our home to Alex Kennedy, but that was another lie, one I only realized this morning when I’d had to think twice before going to the kitchen in my nightgown.
“Hi! I’m Chip! I see you’re looking at our Exotica set!”
This set of exclamations came from the fresh-faced young salesman who swooped down on me as I perused the expensive teak deck sets that were too large to ever fit on our deck. I saw dollar signs gleaming in his eyes when he held out his hand. Before I had time to protest, he started rattling off all the benefits of the furniture, including resistance to termites.
“I don’t think we have much of a problem with termites,” I told him.
“This set is also weather resistant! And I know you’ve got weather!” He almost, not quite, nudged me with his elbow. I was reminded strongly of Monty Python’s Eric Idle and his “wink wink, nudge nudge, know what I mean?” routine. I laughed. Chip laughed, too. “Right? Am I right?”
“Yes, we’ve got weather, but—”
“Well, this set will stand up to anything Mother Nature can throw at you. Do you have a big yard?”
“Not really. We have a very small piece of property.”
“Oh.” The dollar signs dimmed.
I felt bad. I hadn’t meant to make him think I was actually going to buy the outrageously pricey table and chairs. Compulsion forced me to keep talking. “It’s a lakefront property, so we have mostly sand and stones.”
“Oh!”
Bing bing bing! That was all Chip had to hear. Lakefront property apparently equaled big sale in his mind. I’d been looking for a reason to linger. I felt so bad, I allowed him to regale me with descriptions of nearly every piece of furniture in the store. By the time he was finished, I’d agreed on a glider swing and a brand-new set of grilling tools, neither of which we needed.
I escaped with Chip’s cheery farewell echoing in my ears, and gave myself a mental kicking. James wouldn’t care that I’d spent the money. He’d probably love the swing and the tools. New things made him happy. My self-flagellation came from the fact I’d allowed myself to be nudged into buying something I didn’t want and didn’t need simply because I felt guilty about disappointing someone.
A stranger! A salesperson! A man I’d never have to see again! I wanted to smack myself. I wanted to march back inside the store and cancel the order, but through the window I could see Chip doing some sort of congratulatory victory dance for his co-workers. With a heavy sigh, I got into my car.
Worst of all, the shopping trip had left me without the energy to keep avoiding my house. Resigned, I hit Kroger and spent more money, this time on items I wanted. And needed. I hesitated in the alcohol aisle, the one I generally didn’t go down. Today, in honor of having company, I picked up a bottle of merlot James liked. After some more consideration, I also set a six-pack of dark beer in my cart. From the way James had smelled upon coming to bed last night, they’d finished the beer from the fridge downstairs. It wouldn’t hurt to bring home a few more. A six-pack wasn’t a big deal.
My eyes traced over the rows of bottles with pretty-colored labels. Pictures of pirates and sexy wenches, azure seas. Escape, those bottles said. Sex, they murmured. Fun, they proclaimed. A party’s not a party without Bacardi.
Well. I wasn’t planning a party, only a dinner for three. Beer and wine would be enough. I turned my back on the bottles and their siren’s song and headed home.
Alex had gone out and returned while I was gone. His car, which earlier had been parked slantwise next to the detached garage, now sat somewhat straighter. I parked in the driveway so I’d be closer to the door, grabbed two bags of groceries, and let myself in through the side door and into the kitchen.
I stopped in the doorway, feeling like an intruder in my own house. Soft music wafted in from the living room. A jar candle James’s mother had given me, and which had rested unused in a cupboard for months, now burned on the table tucked along the bank of windows overlooking Lake Erie. Pots bubbled on the stovetop and platters of crackers, cheese, vegetables and dip had been laid out on the center island.
Alex turned, spoon in hand, when I came in. He wore low-slung, faded jeans and a button-down Oxford shirt. Unbuttoned. No shoes. His bare feet peeked out from under the frayed hems of his jeans. His hair looked slightly damp, like he’d just come from the shower and swiped a hand through it. It was the color of some luxury hardwood I couldn’t name, the shade of a burnished desk in an executive’s office. Brownish-red with darker and lighter strands.
“Anne,” he said after a moment in which I said nothing, just gaped. “Need a hand?”
I looked at the bags in my hands. “Oh. Sure, I’ve got more in the car.”
He set the spoon into the metal spoon rest designed to prevent utensils from staining the counter. I never managed to remember to use it, setting spoons all over the place no matter if it made a mess. He reached for the dishtowel slung over his shoulder and wiped his hands.
“I’ll get the rest from the car. C’mon in. Have some wine.”
He pushed past me before I could respond with more than a nod. I set my purchases on the kitchen table. He’d found the wineglasses someone had bought us as a wedding gift. Ruby liquid sparkled in two of them.
I looked at the stove. Mushrooms and onions simmered in what smelled like a garlic/butter/wine concoction. I peeked beneath the lid of another pot. Rice. Corn on the cob steamed in a third. A glance through the windows overlooking the deck showed the grill, smoking. I breathed in, deep. Everything smelled delicious.
“You’ve been busy,” I said when he came in, laden with twice as many bags as I’d be able to carry.
“Nah.” He put them on the table and looked up. His hair, drying, feathered along the back of his neck and over his ears and fell in strands over his eyebrows. He picked up the two glasses of wine, then came over to me, one held out. “I figured it was the least I could do. Make dinner.”
I took the glass automatically, the way people tend to do when someone hands them something. “You didn’t have to.”
His smile warmed me all the way to my toes, and he leaned forward, just a little. “I know.”
“It smells great.” I should’ve taken a step back, but didn’t want to be obvious about it. “You found everything you needed?”
“Yeah.” He sipped his wine and looked around the kitchen. “Man, this town has changed. I headed out to hit the grocery store and damn if I didn’t get lost.”
Before I could answer, his gaze swung around again. Pinning me. “I never would’ve thought good ole Sandusky would support a gourmet food market.”
“I guess it depends on what your standards of gourmet are.”
God, that smile. That slow, lazy smile that promised hours of pleasure. How many knees had that smile spread?
“You have high standards, Anne?” He sipped again and looked at my glass. “You don’t like red? I’ve got some blush, too.”
Somehow, I thought the only blush Alex Kennedy ever had was the kind that came in a bottle. “No, no. That’s okay. I don’t drink wine.”
“I don’t drink…vine,” he said in a thick Dracula accent. “You’re a vampire?”
I laughed, shaking my head. “No, no. I don’t drink wine, that’s all.”
“Want a beer, instead? I picked up a case of Black and Tan. Let me tell you something, Anne, Singapore had a lot of things to love about it, but nothing, and I mean nothing, beats Ohio’s drive-through beer distributors.”
“No, thanks.” I shook my head again.
He reached over to pull open one of the bags from Kroger. “You bought wine and beer, too, I see.” He looked at me with an eyebrow slightly tilted. Quizzical. “You don’t want any?”
A third shake of my head. “No. I don’t drink.”
Alex took a long, slow sip of his wine, finishing it. He put the glass on the counter. “Interesting.”
Self-conscious, I placed my glass down by the sink. I couldn’t bring myself to pour it away. “It’s not that interesting.”
The lid of the saucepan containing the mushrooms and onions began a rat-a-tat-tat trembling as steam fought to escape from beneath it. Alex moved. I moved. My kitchen, like the rest of my house, isn’t large. The old adage about too many cooks made a lot of sense in my kitchen, and not because they’d spoil the broth. Simply because there wasn’t enough room for more than one person at the stove. We danced momentarily, him reaching for the lid and me trying to back out of the way. His open shirt trailed against my arm as he stretched. He tilted the lid off the pot and turned off the flame beneath it. His other hand landed on the small of my back, not pushing or caressing. More like steadying.
The touch was fleeting, withdrawn before I had time to do more than barely feel it. He turned to face me. “I hope you’re hungry.”
My rumbling stomach proved the truth of that. “Starving.”
“Good.”
We stared at each other. The corner of his mouth quirked. I wasn’t sure I liked the way he looked at me. I wasn’t sure I didn’t.
“You’re pretty good in the kitchen.” I looked at the stove, then back at him.
Alex put a hand over his heart and gave a small, half bow that brought him close enough to me so I could smell his cologne. It was the same as it had been the day before, something spicy and exotic. Masculine and yet…flowery. He looked up at me through the fringe of his hair, smiling. Devastating. Charming. And he knew it.
“The bachelor life isn’t all pizza and beer. Well, not all pizza, anyway. When you don’t have anyone to do it for you, you learn how to do it for yourself.”
I emptied bags of perishables and put them in the fridge or freezer. Alex stayed out of the way. I felt him watching me. “Maybe you can give James a few pointers.”
“Jamie’s never had to do it, that’s all. He’s always had someone to do it for him. Mama and two older sisters have taken good care of him. And now he has a wife.”
I turned to look at him. “Yes.”
“And now you take care of him.” He grinned.
I couldn’t decide if he was offering a compliment or an insult. “We take care of each other.”
Alex went to the stove and stirred the pot of bubbling mushrooms and onions. “Poor Alex has nobody to take care of him. So I learned to cook just to save myself from having to eat takeout every night.”
I took a long sniff of the delicious smells coming from the stove. “Well, I’m impressed.”
“Then my evil plan has worked,” he said. “Bwahaha.”
The funny thing was, I couldn’t be certain he was kidding. He didn’t give me the chance to ponder it, though. Alex straightened, put a hand on my shoulder and guided me out to the deck, where he sat me in the comfortable lounge chair and urged me to put my feet up. I was laughing, self-conscious at the attention again, but he just smiled.
“I’m a full-service agent,” he told me. “You sit. I’ll bring you something to drink that you will drink.”
He flipped the steaks on the grill and disappeared into the kitchen. He returned in a moment with a glass of iced tea and the platter of cheese and crackers, which he put on the small table next to my chair.
“I could get used to this.” I took the glass from him. It was too early for dusk, but the breeze off the lake was chill. It would be a good night to light a fire in the clay chiminea shaped like a carp.
After checking the steaks again and turning off the grill, Alex eased into the chair opposite mine. One long leg crossed over the other as he leaned back. His shirt fell open, revealing his chest and belly. I didn’t know how he could stand to wear those jeans so low, but I wasn’t unhappy that he could.
“Mind if I smoke?”
I didn’t care for the smell of cigarette smoke, but I shrugged. “Go ahead.”
Both my parents had always smoked. They still did. The stench of cigarettes clung to their clothes, breath, hair, skin. I hadn’t smelled anything on Alex but his cologne and the scent of garlic, butter and wine.
He lit up, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs and holding it for a moment before letting it seep out slowly, in twin streams from his nose. I watched, admiring the talent. Just because I’d never acquired the habit didn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate a sexy man with smoke curling around his head….
“Sorry?” He’d asked me a question.
“I said, what time is our darling Jamie due home? The steaks are done and so’s everything else.”
I glanced at my watch. “He usually gets home around six. Sometimes later, if he’s tied up on the job.”
Alex made a little O with his lips. “Ooh. Tied up, huh?”
The way he said it made me laugh. I seemed to do that a lot around him. He didn’t laugh, but that smile tilted his mouth again.
I had my glass of tea raised halfway to my mouth when it hit me like a two-by-four. Alex’s smile, its quirking, smirky tilt. It was the smile James wore when he was trying to be sexy. It was as different from James’s normal easy grin as night from day and sat on his face like an imposter. Now I knew why.
He’d stolen it from Alex.
This realization made alternating hot and cold flashes ripple down my spine. I finished the gulp of iced tea that had been arrested halfway down my throat. It burned, and I blinked rapidly against the blurry edge of tears.
Alex smoked, and I watched him. He looked out over the lake, toward the glittering lights of the roller coasters. “Did you ever work there?”
“No.” My family lived on Mercy Street, way across town. “I didn’t have a car.”
“Me neither. I rode my bike.”
“So you grew up in town.” James and his sisters had grown up in a house in one of the nicer neighborhoods. His parents still lived there. His sisters and their husbands had stayed in the area.
“Yeah. My mom and the old man still live here.”
I’d been layering a cracker with thin-sliced Gouda, but at this revelation I looked up. “They do?”
He smiled around his cigarette, eyes still looking toward the park. After a moment he looked at me, heavy-lidded. A little sly. “Yeah.”
But he was here, with us. With James. With me.
There could be a thousand reasons why he wasn’t staying in his childhood home. I didn’t need to even guess one of them. “Families suck” had pretty much said it all. Even so, my face must have shown something of my surprise, because Alex let out a slow, grating laugh.
“We don’t get along, the old man and me.”
“That’s too bad.”
He shrugged and finished the cigarette, stamping it out in the empty cola c
an on the arm of his chair. “I haven’t seen him since before I left for Asia. My mom calls once in a while.”
“Do you get along with your mother?”
“Do you get along with yours?”
I blinked at his tone, just this side of mocking. “I get along with both my parents.”
“And Jamie’s, what about them?”
“I get along with them, too.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” Alex scolded, raising and moving one finger from side to side. “Anne, it’s not nice to lie.”
My feelings toward my husband’s mother were complicated and made me uneasy. I shrugged again. “You’ve known them longer than I have.”
“Yeah.” He flicked the top on his square silver lighter and lit the flame, but didn’t take out another cigarette. The flame flickered and died, and he lit it again. “But I didn’t marry Evelyn’s wittle boy.”
“She means well.” The cracker and cheese were dry as dust in my mouth, and I had to swallow more tea to wash it down.
“Sure, she does.” Alex got up and went to the railing. Leaning over, one foot propped on the bottom rail, he stared out over the water. “Don’t they all?”
I heard the rumble of tires on gravel. James. Relieved, for the conversation with Alex had definitely taken an awkward turn, I got up to greet my husband. He came through the kitchen like a dervish, grabbing up a handful of baby carrots and leaping through the screen door hard enough to slam it back against the house.
“Honey, I’m home!”
He wasn’t looking at me when he said it.
Alex turned, rolling his eyes. “It’s about time, fucker. We’re starving.”
“Hey, sorry, man, we can’t all be independently wealthy bastards.”
James slung an arm around my neck in a way I’ve always hated because it snags my hair and weighs me down. He kissed my cheek. I smelled carrots.
