Blackjack and Moonlight: A Contemporary Romance

by Braden, Magdalen

  “I don’t know what you want,” Peggy blurted out. “You want me to apologize? I’m sorry. I hurt you horribly, and your dad, and all because I wasn’t in love with him.”

  “I don’t remember what it was like,” Elise said quietly. “If I cried then, I simply don’t remember.”

  Finally Peggy spoke, her voice soft and resonating with her discomfort. “You cried a lot when I had to leave you with Pete.”

  “Daddy? I don’t remember crying at his house.”

  “He wasn’t in the Shaker Heights house. He hadn’t met your stepmother yet. It was the house I’d left. I never objected to his having you at holidays or in the summer, so you used to fly back to Ohio.”

  Elise didn’t recall any airplane flights that far back. “When I was six?”

  “I took you for the first couple of years. I’d drop you off at Pete’s—I mean, your dad’s house and fly back to Oregon.”

  “I don’t remember any of this,” Elise said. She felt cold at the image of her as a kid, being dropped off at her dad’s house. Her mother didn’t make it sound like a happy reunion.

  “You probably blocked it out.”

  “Why?”

  There was a long pause, and then a sigh. “The trips made you miserable, sweetheart. You would start to cry the moment I left and you wouldn’t stop. Pete couldn’t get you to calm down when I’d drop you off. He tried, but nothing worked. You’d stop eventually, I guess from exhaustion. Then the next day, as soon as you asked for me and he had to tell you I’d gone, you’d start up again.”

  Elise walked over to the window on her tiny garden. It was another sizzling August day and the plants looked worn down by the summer heat.

  “Why couldn’t you just stay with me?” she asked in a small voice.

  “You mean, stay with you at Pete’s house?”

  “Yes,” Elise burst out. “I was crying for you, wasn’t I? You dropped me off like a parcel and just left me. You could have stayed.” Her tears were back, silent ones that dripped onto her chest.

  “El, get serious. I cheated on your father. If he didn’t hate me, he came damn close. I deserved it, of course. Plus, we’d vowed not to fight in front of you.”

  “No fighting. Right.” Actually, that rang a bell in Elise’s mind. Both Peggy and Dad had been scrupulous about not putting each other down. “How long did my crying last?”

  “For days. After that, you’d go all quiet and play by yourself.”

  “No, I meant, how old was I when I grew out of that? It sounds so childish.”

  “I’m not sure.” Peggy sounded worn down by the topic. “I think you got better at hiding it as you got older. So, I don’t know. Maybe eleven or twelve? Of course, by that point you’d gotten surly with all of us. Classic adolescent behavior.”

  Elise remembered those years. “That’s why you sent me to stay with Dad for high school. Because I was a brat.”

  “Jeez, you really have this backward,” Peggy exclaimed. “No, it wasn’t because you were a brat. Pete and I discussed it and we agreed that you needed more stability and attention than I was giving you in Oregon. I was in school plus working, he’d remarried so your stepmother was available during the day with the boys. It made sense.”

  When they’d talked with her about that move, Elise remembered saying “Whatever” to anything anyone suggested to her. She’d been a brat.

  She frowned. “Did you ever talk to someone about those crying jags from when I was younger? Did you ever get help for me, or even for yourself?”

  “No. I couldn’t afford it, and Pete—well, he doesn’t think psychologists know what they’re talking about.” Peggy’s voice softened. “We just waited for you to grow out of it. And you seemed to do that.”

  “Oh.” Elise could feel something solid in the fog, a handle that she just needed to grab onto. “Okay. Yeah, okay. Thanks, Mom. I need to figure this out, okay?”

  “El—?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did Jack propose?”

  There was that gleam of metal again, the sense that she could find her way if she could just hold on to the one real thing in her world.

  “Kind of,” Elise answered.

  “I hope it works out, sweetheart.”

  “Me too.”

  Elise struggled to get back to some version—one without any pillowcases—of her Sunday routine. She went down to her office, looked longingly at her computer, but she hadn’t been able to find any work to bring home, just a couple of back issues of The Practical Litigator…and she’d read them on Saturday. Finally she gave up and called Christine.

  “Hey, stranger, I haven’t heard from you for a long time.”

  Elise cleared her throat. “I know. I’ve been unhappy,” she said baldly. She picked up Jack’s moonlight paperweight, turning it over in her hand.

  “No shit. Tell me something I don’t already know.”

  “I started crying at a pillowcase.”

  “Wait, you mean into a pillowcase, right?”

  “No. At it. Because it smells of my laundry detergent. And not of Jack.”

  There was a pause. “Oh.” Christine’s tone conveyed equal amounts of horror and sympathy.

  “Yeah,” Elise said. The light played off the wave, frozen in the act of breaking.

  “Hey, how come you keep ducking my calls? And where’s Kim? My calls just go to your voice mail. At least let me cheer you up. I know, it’s not too late—let’s go to brunch. Bloody Marys can cure almost anything.”

  “They fired Kim.”

  Christine sighed. “Oh, shit. I was afraid of that.”

  “You knew that was going to happen?” Elise demanded.

  “Not exactly. I knew there was talk of cost-cutting.”

  “Well, I’m suing them if they don’t rehire her.”

  “We’re in an employment-at-will state. They can fire anyone they want.”

  “I’m basing it on federal law, that she was entitled to unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act.”

  “Did she request unpaid leave?”

  “As a matter of fact, she did, back when Donny first got injured. It was in an email she sent to HR, explaining that she might need some time as he’d be out of work for a while and she’d be needed at home. They never answered her.”

  Christine whistled. “They were on notice.”

  “Precisely. I’ve drafted a brief, which I forwarded to Geoff as a courtesy. It’s even money they’ll rehire Kim and fire me.”

  “And what does that have to do with pillowcases?”

  Trust Christine to get back to the point.

  “Nothing. Everything. Oh, I don’t know. I’m just really sad,” Elise admitted.

  Christine huffed. “What’s really going on, sweetie?”

  “I talked with my mother this morning.”

  “She’s okay, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah, she’s great. We—she asked about Jack and I started crying, and she yelled at me.”

  “What for? Breaking up with Jack?”

  Elise frowned. She put the paperweight down and poked at the paperclips in a bowl on her desk. “No. She yelled at me for crying. She told me I wasn’t six anymore.”

  “I’m confused. What’s being six got to do with pillowcases not smelling like your hunky judge?”

  Elise could feel it again, that metallic glint of a doorknob, or window latch or something, a handle leading out of the mystery. “I was really sad as a kid, being shuttled back and forth between Mom in Eugene and Dad in Ohio. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t sad, just grumpy and sullen.”

  “I know what that looks like,” Christine muttered.

  “But that’s the part I don’t get. Why am I crying?”

  “Uh, because Jack McIntyre broke up with you—? Does that tiny detail ring a bell?”

  Elise glared at the paperweight, beautiful and frozen. That wave would never break. “Yeah, I get that part. That’s not what I mean. What I’m asking is—I predicted his departure from the
very beginning. It was my master plan, for God’s sake. So why am I unhappy it succeeded?”

  There was a pause, then Christine sounded like she was working through the puzzle. “I see—you want to know why, if you always knew your time with him was temporary, you’re now so miserable that he’s left?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Other than the fact that he was an amazing lover, devoted boyfriend, and damned good bet for the future, I really couldn’t say.” Christine’s voice was soft with empathy. She sounded like Peggy. Both of them made Elise feel like she was too freaking stupid to get the point.

  “You and my mother. What the fuck are you people not telling me?” Elise yelled.

  “Whoa. Calm down. What did I do?”

  “I admit it, okay? I admit I fell in love with him. He broke up with me. He’s the one who left. Why am I the bad guy?” Elise stormed.

  “Elise. No one is saying you’re the bad guy. We’re just pointing out that Jack’s not the bad guy either. He didn’t break up with you, he left because you didn’t give him a choice.”

  There it was again. A silvery doorknob. If Elise could just grab it and pull…

  Suddenly she was remembering Bart Mather before the Everton hearing, insisting that she’d broken up with him. Only she hadn’t. They’d just stopped dating. No one broke up with anyone, no one left—

  “Chris? I gotta go. I’ll call you later, or stop by your office, or we’ll have lunch, I promise.”

  “Okay, but what’s goin—”

  Elise hung up before she heard the rest of that question, but she knew the answer. She was about to pull on the handle.

  Several cups of coffee later, Elise felt hyper. And calmer than she had in a long time.

  She still didn’t remember those childhood flights to and from Ohio, but just picturing her flight to Oregon on Father’s Day—seeing the departures hall at Philadelphia Airport in her mind—was enough to trigger more tears. It was the same feeling she’d had with the pillowcase—that she was alone and nothing would be right again.

  Leaving Jack for her flight had been excruciating not because of Peggy’s heart attack but because Elise must have worried she’d never see him again. She understood now why she didn’t like leaving people.

  People. Men. That clicked—all those guys she’d dated, some she’d even liked. Every single one of them had conveniently “left” before she could feel more for them than she cared to. She’d never needed to break up with any of them, either. They just stopped—no, that wasn’t right.

  Elise traced a pattern on her tablecloth. The men hadn’t left, exactly. They’d given up. They might have been the ones leaving, but she hadn’t given them much reason to stay. They all dumped her—no, she was getting it wrong again. She would date a guy, have fun, then when he pushed for something more, more of a commitment, something, the relationship ended. Elise would stop returning phone calls, work would get busy, something. Eventually, the guys gave up or left or whatever.

  Christ. Good thing Jack had fallen in love with her at first sight, because she certainly didn’t give men much time to decide if they even liked her. Of course, Jack was a colossus compared to the frat-boy types she’d dated before him. No wonder she kept insisting she was a beer-in-the-cheap-seats sort of date. Her attitude to romance was firmly stuck in sophomore year of college.

  Jack. Elise choked back a half-laugh, half-sob at the thought of his patience with her. Poor guy. She’d never given him a chance, had she? She’d been so certain he was going to leave her that she made it impossible for him to stay. Well, he was gone now, probably for good. Good going, Elise.

  Her head shot up. She was doing it again, wasn’t she? Pushing a man out of her life, then convincing herself that he hadn’t really wanted her after all. Because, if he’d wanted her—if her parents had really wanted her—they wouldn’t have left her on her own.

  Only this was Jack McIntyre, not a frat boy. Hell, he wasn’t even like her parents, who had loved her but couldn’t figure out how to reassure her. Or Tom, who’d rejected Peggy, not a seven-year-old girl who just got caught in the adult crossfire. No way had Jack fallen out of love with her in, what—one week? Not her Blackjack, her superhero Boy Scout—fidelity was in his DNA.

  Elise grabbed her keys and dashed out of the house before she could think twice. It was ninety-something in the shade but who the hell cared. Philadelphia was half-asleep on a dusty, end-of-summer Sunday. There was very little traffic, even on Broad Street. She ran to his house in Society Hill, arriving overheated, drenched with sweat and frankly disreputable in her doing-the-laundry shorts and tank top.

  He wouldn’t care, though. He loved her.

  Blackjack McIntyre loved Elise Carroll.

  She grinned in relief.

  Two minutes later, Elise revised that statement. Blackjack McIntyre might love her but he wasn’t home to confirm that.

  She patted her pockets. No phone. No money, either. Crap.

  Nothing to do but walk back home. Twenty sweltering blocks in which to decide what her best move was. And as much as she wanted to phone him the moment she got inside her house, find him, glue herself to him, she hesitated. There was a principle at stake. She needed to do something huge to demonstrate she’d turned a corner and wasn’t ever going back.

  First thing Monday morning, Elise called Brenda, Jack’s secretary. Not a pleasant conversation at first, as Brenda made it very clear it was damned uncomfortable working around his honor since the wedding and that they all blamed Elise.

  Elise apologized profusely, then told Brenda what she needed, swearing her to secrecy. Brenda put her on hold while one of Jack’s law clerks made the necessary arrangements for later in the day.

  When she got off the phone, Elise’s heart felt like a drum corps had taken up residence. She glanced down at her navy dress. She fingered her pearls.

  If this worked, she would get another chance to show Jack that a well-dressed lawyer kept her pearls on, even while naked in chambers.

  Elise left her office and headed for the elevator, her eyes fixed on her watch. She’d timed it just right. She could get to the courthouse with enough time to go through security and up to the tenth floor and into his courtroom without running into anyone.

  She nearly slammed into Geoff.

  “Okay, you win.” His voice was solemn. She looked up. There was a sly grin on his face.

  “What?” Elise was confused.

  “Kim will be back next week.”

  “Great,” Elise said, reaching around him to press the down button.

  “Don’t you want to know if you still have a job?”

  Elise looked up at the indicator lights. She needed an elevator now. “Not especially. But if you want to tell me…”

  The elevator doors opened and she walked in, then turned to press the button for the lobby. Geoff was staring at her. Finally he put his hand on the elevator door edge to keep it from closing.

  “What’s more important than your job here?” he asked.

  She grinned at him. “True love.” She pushed his hand off the door so it could close.

  “All rise,” Tony said in his basso profundo voice.

  Jack walked across to the bench. He had papers in front of him, but he’d had no time to read them. Just as the clerk’s office was closing, they’d called up with an emergency hearing. Brenda had told him that he was needed in court immediately to rule on a request for a temporary restraining order, his first TRO hearing.

  He looked up. There was no one at the plaintiff’s table, which made no sense. Jack looked over at Ms. Riley, who was in the clerk’s seat. Before he could say anything to her, though, someone stood and walked over to stand at the defendant’s table. Elise. Jack was still struggling to process the sight of her when she addressed the court.

  “Your Honor, my name is Elise Carroll, and I’m here today to seek an emergency ruling by this Court.”

  She was wearing that navy blue dress, the one with the buttons. He
also recognized the pearls. She looked—she looked like heaven. Like a dream, that sad one that woke him when it didn’t end well.

  Thank God for a judicial demeanor.

  “Proceed, Ms. Carroll,” he said slowly.

  “Some months ago, Your Honor saw fit to recuse yourself from hearing a case in which I was counsel of record.”

  “Yes.”

  “If I may, I’d like to refer to the transcript of that hearing.”

  Jack couldn’t tell where she was going with this, but there was no way he wasn’t along for the ride. “Counsel may proceed.”

  “‘The Court: In compliance with the canon of judicial ethics, I must recuse myself from hearing this case because I am in love with counsel for the defendant.’ Does Your Honor recall making that statement?”

  Jack could hear the court reporter snickering, and, sure enough, Ms. Riley was grinning from ear to ear. As well she should, he thought viciously, given how bad his temper had been recently. Seeing Elise in his court improved his disposition immensely, but he was still guarded.

  “Yes, Ms. Carroll, I recall making that statement. Do you have a point here? Because the Court is very busy.”

  “Yes, Your Honor, I do have a point. If I may refer to one additional item from the transcript?”

  “If you must,” Jack said in his best bored judge voice. He couldn’t read her expression. Should he be happy or very, very nervous?

  “‘The Court: Have you never heard of love at first sight, Ms. Carroll? Ms. Carroll: Love at first sight is about as real as the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus.’” Elise looked up from the copy of the transcript she was holding. “Do you recall that exchange, Your Honor?”

  “I realize now I should have held you in contempt of court. Don’t give me a second bite at that apple, Ms. Carroll,” he warned in a mock growl.

  She never looked away. She even looked respectful, although that could be a trick of the light.

  “No, Your Honor, I won’t. May it please the Court, I request the chance to change my position on the matter.”