by T. L. Haddix
Too drained to argue, Ainsley sat. She accepted a tissue and used it to blot the dampness from under her eyes.
“Ben… when we were dating, he flirted a little with me. Teased me. But more often than not, he was either being quietly serious or fumbling through something. Not that he was clumsy, necessarily,” she hurried to explain, “but he was awkward. Green. If that makes any sense. We both were.”
Zanny shook her head slowly. “I just don’t know what to think. Ainsley, Ben’s always been so easy-going, so laid back. I’ve hardly ever seen him fumble anything.”
“He probably just didn’t think I was worth the effort of flirting with.”
“No.” That was dismissed almost instantly with the wave of a hand. “Flirting is second nature to Ben. He does it without thinking. If he didn’t flirt with you, it wasn’t because you didn’t mean anything to him. If nothing else, I’d say that means you meant more to him, rather than less.”
They studied each other in silence for a minute. Ainsley was so confused, her head literally ached.
“I saw him this morning. He showed up at the house to cut the grass.”
Zanny sat back a little, settling in more comfortably on the couch. “How’d it go?”
Ainsley scratched the side of her neck where a loose curl was tickling her skin. “Um, not well. I may have pushed him into the pool.”
The snort of laughter burst out of Zanny before she could contain it. She quickly clapped her hand over her mouth, but her eyes danced with merriment.
“He propositioned me,” Ainsley continued before she could ask. “For old times’ sake. I didn’t react well.”
“He didn’t. Seriously? For old time’s sake?” Zanny pursed her lips. “He’s lucky a dunking is all you gave him.”
Ainsley covered her face. “I may have thrown a smoothie at him, too. Oh, dear God. What a damned mess.” The day had just been too much, and she broke down. She wasn’t sobbing, but she couldn’t hold the tears back, either.
Zanny touched her shoulder lightly. “I’ll be right back.”
When she returned a minute later, she had a glass of ice water in hand. Ainsley had herself under control and was mopping her face.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. It sounds like you’ve had a rough day. First, seeing Ben again, and then finding me in the bakery when you were probably just hoping for a donut.”
Ainsley gave a watery chuckle. “Actually, I was hoping for a custard-filled chocolate éclair. Or three.”
“You have to get here early in the day for those. They sell out fast.” Zanny sighed. “May I ask you a question?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Why’d you break Ben’s heart? Why did you marry someone else?”
Ainsley stared down at her hands. “It’s complicated. It wasn’t my choice.” She looked over at Zanny. “That isn’t true—it was my choice. But it was the best choice I had at the time, for me and for Ben.”
Zanny watched her closely. “You know, I was prepared to not like you, because I do adore Ben. And you hurt him. But I’ll be damned if I don’t like you. Maybe I’m a fool, but I think you hurt as badly as he does.”
“I know he thinks I just flitted off to Lexington and hung him out to dry. That I used him. I didn’t.” She shook her head at her own foolishness. “And even though I did what I had to do, and I know that, I hate myself for doing it. I finally reconciled myself to that a couple of years ago. Sometimes, doing what’s right for another person means you have to hurt them. It doesn’t make the self-loathing any less painful.”
Zanny blew out a breath. “Oh, girl, I understand that.” She looked away, over at a poster-size photograph of two young boys. “John and I spent the last few months separated. We only reconciled formally this past weekend. I pushed for the separation, and he didn’t understand why. It hurt him. But it was necessary.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. But like I said, it was necessary. It took him a while to see that necessity, though. The whole process was painful.”
Something about the way Zanny was looking at the black-and-white picture cued Ainsley in, and she looked closer at the boys. Dressed semi-formally in jeans and dress shirts, they were posed on a plain background, seated on the ground beside each other. The older boy was slightly behind the younger one, supporting him. The little-boy mischief in their eyes practically leapt off the paper. Ainsley thought she saw a resemblance to Ben, especially with the younger boy.
“Are those guys yours?”
A proud maternal smile spread across Zanny’s face. “They are. Noah’s the oldest. He’s five. Eli’s going to be two in a few weeks.” She hesitated. “John said you and your husband didn’t have any children.”
The pain was instantaneous and sharper than usual. “I can’t have children. I had a miscarriage a few years ago, and there were complications.”
Zanny clasped her hand. “Oh, Ainsley. I’m so sorry.”
“So am I. Maybe it’s for the best,” she said with a sigh. “In any event, I should go. I can’t say this has been fun, necessarily, but I’m glad I met you today.”
“So am I. I wondered what you were like for a long time. Ever since Ben was so mysterious that summer, as a matter of fact.” She stood when Ainsley did. “What are you going to do about his proposition? Since I’m the nosiest person in the world.”
They both laughed. “You know, I don’t know. I don’t think he was serious. My friend Byrdie, she’s here with me. She thinks I should take him up on it. Get some closure for both of us. And I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
“I have one of those faces,” Zanny teased lightly. “I would love to have seen his face this morning when he hit the water. You know his mother would wash his mouth out with soap for doing that.”
“He was surprised. And still impertinent when he came up for air.”
Zanny walked her to the door. “I don’t want to see Ben hurt again, but I agree that you both need closure. And it doesn’t sound like whatever was between you is anywhere near being over and done with. Not to lay extra guilt on your shoulders, but he changed so drastically that summer. He keeps a part of himself separate, even now. If there’s any chance at all you can work things out, even if it means you walk away from each other at the end, well, I think maybe you both deserve that chance.”
After promising to stop back by, Ainsley said goodbye. Her meeting with Zanny had given her a lot to think about, and it was the kind of thinking Ainsley accomplished best while doing something mindless.
She wondered if knowing Zanny’s identity then would have changed anything. “No,” she told herself in the privacy of her car. “It wouldn’t have made Geneva stop what she was doing.”
And the truth of the matter was that the anger and sense of betrayal Ainsley had felt had been part of what had gotten her through those first tough months. If she hadn’t had that broken heart burning in her brain, keeping her from asking so many “what ifs,” she truly might not have survived. Proving to Ben that she could survive without him, even though he would never know the price she’d paid, had been stellar motivation. In a way, it had saved her life. And she couldn’t regret that she’d survived, not even with the knowledge that he’d been hurt more deeply than she had thought.
Chapter Fifteen
A late afternoon thunderstorm was rolling through the valley when John Campbell got home from work. He entered through the kitchen door off the carport, and after setting his briefcase and suit coat on the bench by the door, he walked to the sink to wrap his arms around Zanny and give her a long kiss.
“I missed you today,” he told her when he came up for air.
She laughed softly. “As opposed to every other day when you don’t miss me?”
“No, I miss you those
days, too.” After another quick kiss, he pulled back. “Where are the boys?”
“Noah’s reading to Eli in the living room,” she answered in a low voice. “The rain’s making them drowsy.”
He let his hand run down her back as he edged around her. Going to the door, he looked toward the front of the house. His sons were curled up on the couch together, both of them asleep. For a man who’d come close to losing everything, the sight was more precious than gold.
“Come look.”
Zanny came, and they stood there for a while, just watching the boys sleep. “Think they’ll always be that close?”
“I hope so. I’d like to see them have the kind of relationship Ben and I have. Not,” he added, “that I’d like to curl up on the couch with him.”
“I know someone who would,” Zanny replied. She turned and pushed him backward, into their bedroom, where she closed the door. “I met Ainsley today.”
John let her unbutton his shirt and slide it off his shoulders. Bracing his hands on the door on either side of her, he rested his body against hers. When she looped her arms around his waist with a sigh, content to just touch, he focused on what she’d said. “How’d that come about?”
“She was at the bakery. I was grabbing a snack before heading home.” Zanny ran her hands over his chest and then down his shoulders to his arms. “What do you know about her?”
“More than I did. She met with Hershel again today, and after she left, I explained a little of what I suspected. He filled in some of the blanks.” He pushed away from the door and stripped down, then moved to the closet to pull out a clean T-shirt and khaki shorts.
“I’m waiting.”
He gave her a quick smile. “I’m thinking of how to explain what he said. It’s actually pretty complicated.”
“I got that impression myself. She thought Ben and I were involved,” she told him casually.
John stopped in the act of pulling the T-shirt over his head. “She what?”
“I thought that would get your attention. She thought we were involved. Intimately. The summer they broke up, I guess. She saw us on the street, and he was flirting with me. She got the wrong impression.”
Returning to stand in front of her at the door, John scowled. Before he could figure out which issue to address first, she continued.
“John, he doesn’t flirt with her. At all. He fumbles around her. He isn’t smooth.”
He cursed under his breath, understanding immediately why Zanny was concerned. Even when he had been only a little older than Noah, Ben was smooth with girls. “She’s different. He’s serious about her.”
Zanny nodded. “That’s my conclusion. I’m afraid she’s it for him. And I think, based on what I saw of her today, that she still feels strongly about him, as well. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.” She opened the door, and he followed her into the kitchen. “Tell me what Hershel said.”
After taking a cola from the fridge, he sat down on one of the barstools at the island. “He and his wife have known Ainsley since she was born. He thinks a lot of her. I told you that a few weeks ago. Turns out, she’s like a second child to them in a lot of ways. After I explained that she and Ben used to date, he got pretty quiet for a little bit. I guess she didn’t have much of a social life growing up, from what he said. And he knew exactly when they dated. He just had never known who she’d been seeing.”
“She seems quiet and reserved. Friendly, but cautious,” Zanny said. “I liked her pretty well, and I didn’t expect to. I asked her why she broke Ben’s heart.”
“What’d she say?” he asked, peeling the label off the bottle.
“That she had made the best choice she could at the time, and that sometimes, you have to hurt the people you care about most in order to do what’s right for them.” She touched his hand with hers, and he laced their fingers together. “She said she had made a choice, but I don’t know. I didn’t get the impression she really had much of a choice. Maybe I’m just imagining things, though.”
“No. Hershel said about the same. Said that her mother was hell on wheels, and not in a good way. She was partially paralyzed when Ainsley was born, thanks to a birthing injury, and she took it out on the people around her. He said she was ruthless in going after what she wanted. Hershel and Tammy, his wife? They always suspected the reason Ainsley married Doug Scott was more for the sociopolitical alliance than anything and that Geneva had engineered it. Said she crowed about it for months after it was done.”
“You think she married him to please her mother?”
John hesitated. “I don’t know. Hershel also wondered about whether or not she’d had a choice in the matter.”
Zanny filled a cooker with water while John finished his drink. “I know I didn’t have an ideal home life growing up. But I’m trying to think of what Dennis could have said or done to force me to marry someone else after I’d fallen in love with you. I can’t imagine anything that would make me walk away from you.”
“Your dad was one kind of overbearing. I think Geneva Brewer was a whole other level entirely. Seems she had very specific ideas of what it meant to be part of the elite ‘ruling class’ in Hazard society. Ainsley never measured up in her eyes, and Geneva never let her forget that. Hershel said she seemed to live to tell Ainsley how ‘common’ she was.”
“Poor girl.” Zanny’s face was full of sympathy.
John felt similarly. “She never stood up to Geneva. That just made it worse, he said.”
Zanny frowned. “Hmmm. Now that is interesting, especially given what she did to your brother this morning.”
“They saw each other?”
“Oh, yeah. He went to cut the grass.” The sound of a car door closing interrupted her, and she stood on her tiptoes to glance out the kitchen window. John unashamedly checked out the way her shorts cupped her bottom as she stretched. “Speak of the devil. Guess who’s here?” She went to unlock the door and let him in.
“Hey, gorgeous.” Ben hugged her and tousled her hair affectionately.
John scowled, amused and irritated—mostly amused, though he would never tell Ben that. “Quit flirting with my wife.”
“Nah. Somebody has to keep you in line.” Ben stepped over to him and wrapped his arms around John’s neck from behind, holding him in a fake wrestling hold. “You’re just jealous.”
Zanny laughed at their antics. “Are you here to cut the grass, Ben? If so, I’m afraid you’re rained out.”
“Yeah, that’s what I stopped by to tell you.”
“What, your phone at the apartment doesn’t work? You couldn’t just call?” John asked.
Ben sat beside him. “Nope. Why are you so grumpy?”
“Because I’m pretty sure I smell meatloaf, and I don’t want to share,” came the instant response. “And I know how you like Zanny’s meatloaf.”
She smacked him lightly with the dish towel. “John David, hush. Ben, I am fixing meatloaf, and I made double because I was expecting you. Stay for dinner?”
Ben grinned at John’s irritation. “If you insist. Where are my nephews?”
“Asleep on the couch. Why don’t the two of you wake them up, get them ready to eat?” she suggested. “By the time they’re conscious, I’ll have the food ready.”
“We can do that.” John stood and clapped his brother on the shoulder. “Come on, old man. That’s our cue. We’re being tossed out.”
He watched Ben closely, trying to not be obvious about it, as they played with the boys. His brother was definitely being quieter than usual, and given what Zanny had said about Ben and Ainsley seeing each other that morning, John didn’t need a rocket scientist to figure out why. Not wanting to bring her up in front of the boys, John held his tongue.
Zanny, however, surprised him halfway through the meal. “So,
Benjamin. I hear you took a little unexpected swim this morning.”
Ben choked on his tea. Noah and Eli both thought that was hilarious and started giggling.
“How the fuck did you know that?” he demanded as soon as he could talk.
Zanny’s eyebrows met in a fierce scowl. “Benjamin Wayne, watch your language!”
“I’m sorry.”
It was too late. Eli had picked up on the new word and was repeating it loudly.
“Eli.” John used the voice he’d often heard from his own father, quiet but firm, despite his amusement. He waited until the two-year-old looked at him. “We don’t use that word. Uncle Ben made a boo-boo when he said it. Okay?”
“Okay.” Eli’s entire face screwed up in an unhappy scowl that almost exactly matched the look on Ben’s face, and it was all John could do to not laugh.
“Oh, the Campbell genes are strong in that one,” Zanny muttered. John could see that she was also struggling with laughter.
“So what’s this about an unexpected swim?” John asked.
“A little bird told me that Ben said something very naughty this morning, and he got pushed into a pool as punishment.” Zanny was watching his brother with eyes that sparkled with mirth. John sat back to watch the show.
“It wasn’t naughty. It was maybe inappropriate, but it wasn’t naughty. How the…” He glanced at Eli, cheeks still red. “How the heck did you hear about it?”
“I ran into Ainsley at the bakery. She’s considering your offer, you know.”
Ben was completely silent, staring at her as though she’d started speaking Swahili.
“What was the offer?” John asked.
“To renew their acquaintance,” Zanny answered casually. “For old time’s sake.” She picked her glass up and saluted his brother before taking a drink.
