Going Back

by Judith Arnold

  She returned to the bedroom carrying a tray of food, and Brad discreetly pulled the blanket around him so she wouldn’t notice his condition. She lowered herself onto the bed next to him, then balanced the tray between them on its fold-out legs. It held two plates, a loaf of whole wheat bread, a jar of peanut butter, one of strawberry jam, knives and paper napkins. “I don’t know whether you want something to drink,” she said, crossing her legs squaw-style and reaching for the peanut butter jar, “but while I don’t mind crumbs in bed, I do mind spilled beverages.”

  “That’s understandable,” Brad granted, watching her smear peanut butter onto a slice of bread and fantasizing about her naked body beneath the baggy shirt. The fantasy was so erotic he had to shift his legs and rearrange the cover around him, but Daphne appeared to be unaware of his arousal. She handed him the sandwich she’d begun, and he topped a second slice of bread with jam to complete it.

  “I was right about the linguini,” she reported, preparing another sandwich for herself. “It was disgusting. I had to take the flowers out of the sink in order to soak the pot. The flowers are all mushy, too.”

  “Ask me if I care,” Brad said.

  “The roses I put in the vase are beautiful, though,” she said, offering Brad a sincere smile. “Did I tell you how much I appreciate them?”

  He wondered how often—if ever—Daphne received roses from men. The possibility that she never did saddened him, and he shoved the thought away. “If I’d have known you liked roses, I would have brought you more of them.”

  Daphne chuckled. “You brought plenty of flowers, Brad,” she assured him. “More than I know what to do with, obviously.”

  He was listening to her with only half his mind. His other half continued to scrutinize her as she bit into her sandwich, chewed, swallowed and ran the tip of her tongue over the corners of her mouth to capture the stray crumbs. It vexed him to think that Daphne wasn’t showered with roses from male admirers on a regular basis. She ought to have boyfriends by the dozens, by the hundreds. But she didn’t—for the simple reason that she was homely. The comprehension infuriated him, and yet there he himself was, no better than any other man, wishing that she were prettier so he could think of her as a suitable partner for himself.

  He gently lifted her eyeglasses from her face and set them on the night table behind her. “Why did you do that?” she asked, blinking.

  “You took them off before. I’m just trying to get used to the way you look without them.” He skipped mentioning that she looked better when she wasn’t wearing them, and chose instead to ask, “Have you ever considered wearing contact lenses?”

  She nodded and scowled at the memory. “Right after college, when I moved to Chicago I bought a pair. They were never comfortable. Dust kept blowing into my eyes—believe me, they don’t call Chicago the `Windy City’ for nothing. Then I scratched my cornea taking one out, and I was in a lot of pain from it.” She bit into her sandwich, reminiscing. “Some people just can’t wear contacts. I wish I could. I can still remember one night when I forgot to take them out before going to bed. When I woke up the next morning and opened my eyes, my vision was kind of cloudy, but I could see things. I could read my alarm clock without squinting, and make out the slats on the Venetian blind on my window. I thought I’d been the beneficiary of some sort of overnight transformation, and my eyesight had been miraculously cured. That’s always been one of my lifelong dreams—to wake up one morning and discover that I had perfect vision.”

  Brad lowered his empty plate to the tray and slung his arm around Daphne’s shoulders. It had never occurred to him that for nearsighted people, the worst thing about their situation was not having to wear eyeglasses, but having to contend with poor vision. Instead of feeling sorry for Daphne for having to wear eyeglasses that detracted from her appearance, he ought to feel sorry for her for having a blurry view of the world.

  “What are some of your other lifelong dreams?” he asked, suddenly frustrated by how embarrassingly little he knew about her.

  She popped a corner of crust into her mouth and then snuggled more cozily against him. Her elbow poked into his rib cage in a way that ought to have hurt him, but it didn’t. He wanted her close to him, as close as it was possible to be. Once she had arranged herself comfortably he tightened his hold on her, pinning her to him so she wouldn’t be able to move away. “My lifelong dreams, huh,” she echoed. “Other than waking up with perfect vision?” She ruminated for a minute. “I’d like to be able to buy my partnership in Horizon Realty without having to sign for any more loans.”

  “That doesn’t count,” Brad criticized good-naturedly. “One week ago, you weren’t even thinking in terms of a partnership in the company. I mean your lifelong dreams, dreams you’ve been dreaming for a long time. Like perfect vision.”

  Daphne nodded and lapsed into thought for a minute. “World peace, of course, and a cure for cancer—along with a cure for myopia. And I wouldn’t mind finding Mr. Right someday, and having a child. How about you?”

  “Pretty much the same,” Brad told her. “World peace, a cure for cancer...and a cure for myopia if you want it, Daffy.” He twirled his index finger through a ringlet of her hair as he thought. “I dream that my parents will stop their silly bickering and get back together again. And, sure, the rest of it—a beautiful wife and a couple of kids.”

  He detected a subtle tension rippling through her, causing her shoulders to hunch slightly. Why was she suddenly recoiling from him? What had he said wrong?

  A beautiful wife.

  Surely Daphne didn’t expect Brad to propose marriage to her just because they’d made love. She was a savvy woman, smart and mature. She and Brad both understood the reason for this get-together. It had to do with preserving a friendship, not exploring marital options. They both knew that.

  Gradually it dawned on Brad that Daphne hadn’t been reacting to the word wife. What she’d reacted to was the word beautiful.

  A full minute after he’d spoken, she still hadn’t relaxed within the curve of his arm. He cursed silently, then twisted to peer at her. “Daff?”

  She raised her eyes from the tray to his face. They were dry and blank, refusing to reveal her emotions.

  “Can we talk about this?”

  “About what?” she asked.

  “About why your body’s just dropped twenty degrees in temperature.”

  She turned to stare at the tray again. She pinched the ruffled trim edging the blanket with her fingers, then let her hands go slacken in her lap. “It seems to me,” she said slowly, in a muted voice, “that far too many men—the vast majority of them, no doubt—are looking for beautiful wives.”

  It pained Brad to think of how much his tactless comment must have hurt her—especially since she was brave enough to answer him truthfully when he’d goaded her into saying something she clearly didn’t want to say. “Don’t think you aren’t beautiful,” he said, hoping he wasn’t digging himself even deeper.

  She smiled wryly. “Please don’t be a hypocrite, Brad. One thing we seem to have going for us is honesty. Don’t blow it, okay?”

  Her tone was less bitter than beseeching. She was right, of course—honesty was an essential part of their friendship. Brad had no intention of spoiling that friendship by resorting to hypocrisy.

  Yet when he’d told her, however obliquely, that she was beautiful, he hadn’t been hypocritical. At least at that moment, when a measure of emotion had crept into her face, the faintest glimmer of anguish and fear, he had considered her beautiful. No matter how funny-looking she was from an objective standpoint, she was beautiful, too.

  He sighed. “Daphne,” he murmured, stroking his finger absently behind her ear and wondering how to regain the closeness between them. Abruptly, he realized that they’d never lost that closeness. Talking to Daphne was, in its own way, as intimate an act as making love to her. “Listen to me. You are beautiful.”

  She chuckled—and, again, he detected no trace of bitt
erness in her quiet laughter. “Maybe you’re the one who needs glasses,” she suggested. “I’ll grant you that my face isn’t so horrible it’s going to shatter any camera lenses. But I’m no cover girl, either.”

  “You don’t have to be a cover girl,” he pointed out.

  “Thank God for that,” she said. “If I did have to be one, I’d be in a whole hell of a lot of trouble.”

  “What I meant—” he felt suddenly desperate to make her believe him “—is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

  “No!” she gasped with phony surprise. He recognized that she was mocking him, but she went on before he could defend himself. “I thought it was only skin deep. Or is it beauty is as beauty does?”

  “Daff—”

  She softened, apparently sensing that he needed reassurance even more than she did. “Let me fill you in on a little secret. Believe it or not, most women really do know what they look like. We know that we have our good days—and our bad days, too—but by and large, we’ve got a pretty clear idea of what we look like. When I was growing up with my gorgeous little sister, my parents were always reciting all those charming sayings to me so I wouldn’t feel bad about being so much less attractive than she was. It was all very sweet and well-intended on their part, but none of it changed the fact that I’m a plain-looking woman. Most men look at me and think I’m too tall or too gangly or too blah, or my hair is all wrong or I squint too much. If they take the time to get to know me, they decide that I’m not such terrible company. But they sure as hell don’t think I’m beautiful.”

  Her bluntness stunned Brad. He had never heard a woman speak so frankly about herself, and he wasn’t sure how to react. “Why don’t they fall in love with you?” he asked, too fascinated by her words and her attitude to worry about diplomacy. “You’re wonderful company and—depending on the eyes of the beholder—you’re beautiful, too. Why haven’t you found Mr. Right?”

  “Why hasn’t he found me?” she rejoined with exasperating logic. “Whenever I begin to suspect that I’ve met him, he winds up telling me he thinks of me as a sister.”

  “I don’t think of you as a sister,” Brad told her.

  Daphne’s smile grew wistful. “Not at the moment,” she said. “Not today. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you did yesterday, and you probably will again tomorrow.”

  “No,” he argued. “I don’t think I’ll ever think of you as a sister.”

  She shook her head. “You aren’t my Mr. Right, so it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  He wanted to grab her by her shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled. He wanted to scream at her that she was completely off base, that she didn’t know what she was talking about, that she was beautiful and sexy and perfect in every respect.

  But the thing that made her seem so perfect to him right now had nothing to do with her debatable beauty or her sexiness. It was her candor, her openness, her total lack of guile. It was, above all, her refusal to deny the truth about herself. Brad wasn’t her Mr. Right and he never would be. Regardless of how fantastic making love to her had been, he wasn’t going to marry her. She wasn’t his ideal mate, the woman with whom he intended to build a future and a family—and she wasn’t going to kid herself about it by pretending that she was.

  He carefully removed the tray from the bed and placed it on the floor beside the bed. Then he turned back to her, closing his arms around her, urging her down to the pillow with him. He slid one hand under her hair to the nape of her neck and stroked through the soft wisps of hair there.

  “You seem to be deep in thought,” she observed quietly.

  “Mmm,” he said, struggling to clarify his mind before he spoke. “I’m thinking...I’m thinking that you’re one of the gutsiest women I’ve ever met.”

  “I’m not so gutsy,” she argued. “I’m just realistic.”

  “Whatever you are,” he whispered, touching his lips to her brow, “it’s turning me on.”

  She slipped her hand beneath the top sheet, skimming her fingers over his abdomen and below to feel for herself the evidence of how turned on he was. As her fingers ringed and then ran the length of him, he moaned.

  He itched to unbutton her shirt, to kiss her breasts and inhale the lingering fragrance of her perfume. Yet he held back, strangely protective of her. He waited for a sign, any sign from this brave, magnificent woman that she could possibly desire him as much as he desired her. “Do you want to make love again?” he asked when her silence extended beyond a minute.

  “Yes.”

  “I would like to spend the night with you,” he went on, hoping he wasn’t pressuring her. “I know we didn’t discuss that, but—”

  “I’d like for you to stay,” she assured him.

  “Because—because I don’t really think the first time was a fluke.”

  “A fluke?” She laughed hesitantly.

  He probably shouldn’t have said that, either. But he’d said so many wrong things already, he would let this one pass. Instead of bothering to explain himself—and risking making matters even worse—he worked open the buttons of her shirt, slid it over her shoulders, and kissed her exactly as he’d wanted to, touching his tongue to the dainty indentation between her collarbones, filling his nostrils with the scent of her and his hands with the roundness of her breasts.

  As her response intensified, as her flesh warmed and her breath shortened and her body grew damp with readiness for him, he found himself thinking about how peculiar it was that, just as it had been with the house Daphne had sold him, one didn’t always realize something was the answer to a dream until the dream was already within one’s grasp.

  ***

  INTELLIGENT THOUGH SHE WAS, Daphne knew that there were certain times when thought was your enemy. If she entertained any thoughts about what was going on between her and Brad while he was with her, she’d ruin the weekend.

  So she didn’t think. She simply allowed herself to believe that the whole thing was nothing more than an exorcism of the past, a whimsical way to counter the eight-year-old curse hanging over their friendship. After making love with Brad a few times, she would be hard pressed to remember what that wretched experience had been like back in college. And that was the point—to replace miserable old memories with happy new ones. That was what Brad had had in mind when he’d proposed this weekend. That was the only thing going on between them.

  She refused to be overwhelmed by how lovely it was to wake up beside him. She refused to become sentimental over the pleasure of his company at breakfast. They were friends, not lovers, and friends didn’t wax rhapsodic about how delightful it was to gaze into each other’s sleepy eyes over the morning’s first cup of coffee.

  Damn it, it was delightful, though. Sitting across the table from him, with the morning sun streaming in through the window and the fading scent of the flowers he’d brought her still hanging in the air, she suffered a pang at the understanding that this was all transient, that soon he’d be gone.

  Stifling her emotions, she lowered her eyes from Brad’s face to her nearly empty cup and calmly asked, “When does your plane leave tomorrow?”

  He seemed startled by the down-to-earth tone of her conversational gambit. It was the first coherent statement either of them had made since around two o’clock that morning, when Brad had awakened Daphne from a dream-filled slumber to make love to her again.

  She hadn’t objected. After making love to Brad twice with the bedside lamp on, she found making love to him in the pitch dark something of a novelty. Not that it was any more resplendent an experience than the first two times—or any less resplendent, for that matter—but it was different. Brad’s kisses had been hungrier in the dark, his touch more decisive, more demanding. When he’d rolled her on top of himself she had accommodated his tacit request and remained there, straddling him and taking him, dominating their motions and setting her own pace.

  Whatever it was that exploded between them, it certainly hadn’t been a fluke.

&
nbsp; When it was over, they’d found themselves too invigorated to go back to sleep. They had decided to burn off their excess energy by showering and then cleaning up the kitchen. Brad had refused to go near the pot of clam sauce, but he’d dutifully thrown out the overcooked pasta and the waterlogged flowers, tied up the trash bag and lugged it to the garage, while Daphne had scoured the pots and put away the unused dishes and flatware. Then she’d lit the candles, restarted the Mozart CD and served the fruit and cheese she’d purchased as a romantic dessert for their would-be romantic dinner.

  Gouda, pear slices, grapes and a piano concerto—even at two-thirty in the morning—had proven to be exceptionally romantic.

  “My plane?” he asked after taking a sip of coffee.

  “What I was thinking,” she clarified, nudging the box of corn flakes toward him after filling a bowl for herself, “was that if your plane doesn’t leave until the afternoon, you could stop by one of the banks in town and get your mortgage application started.”

  He nodded. Shaking a heaping mound of corn flakes into his bowl, he said, “It’s a two o’clock flight. But I thought I couldn’t apply for a mortgage without a signed contract.”

  “You can start the ball rolling with an unsigned copy of your contract, and once it’s signed, the bank will already have all your application materials in place. They don’t usually like starting things without the contract, but I have friends in the mortgage departments of some of the banks. They’d do it as a favor for me.”

  “I don’t want you using up your favors on me.”

  If she were permitting herself to think, Daphne would have thought about how for Brad, she’d gladly use up every favor she had coming to her. But that was the wrong approach to take on this sunny Sunday morning, and she avoided it. “The sooner you close on the house, the sooner I get paid my commission. You’d be doing me a favor if you got things started before you left.”

  He nodded again. “All right. Which bank do you recommend?”