The release was instantaneous, and with it came a flood of tears. She didn’t know which would be worse—letting Clark stay to witness this humiliation, or requesting that he leave, so she could bear her pain alone. She didn’t want him with her, and yet she needed him. Needed to be held and reassured. Needed to be comforted.
Whispering soothing words, he gently rocked her, the palm of his hand pressing the back of her head. With nothing left to hide, she slipped her arms around his neck and clung. He was her rock, her stability, her life preserver.
He brushed the hair from her cheek. “It’s going to be all right.”
She hated to disagree with him, especially now when he was being so kind, but she couldn’t help herself. “No, it isn’t.”
“Carol, trust me. It won’t always be this bad.”
“Yes, it will. I’ll never get over him. I fell in love with a worm, but I never expected this to happen.”
“Eddie Shapiro didn’t deserve you.”
She ran the back of her hand over her tear-streaked cheeks. “I know that, everyone does…but that doesn’t make me love him any less.”
He spoke into her hair. “Someday you’ll look back on this and wonder what you ever saw in him.”
“I already do, and it doesn’t help.”
She felt him smile against her temple. She was the undeserving one. She didn’t deserve a friend as wonderful as Clark. That he put up with her was nothing short of amazing.
“Clark,” she whispered, lifting her head from his chest and meeting his gaze through tear-filled eyes. “Kiss me.”
He blinked as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. “Kiss you? Now? Why?”
“Because I want to feel something besides this pain. Please…you were eager enough not so long ago.” The pain of actually seeing Eddie was bad enough. But that pain was only a small portion of what she felt, and Clark had witnessed it all. She’d bared her soul, unable to hide behind a facade of disinterest. So maybe kissing him wasn’t such a good idea, but she certainly hadn’t expected an argument from him.
Taking matters into her own hands, she took away his option to choose and kissed him. Her palms on either side of his head, she angled her mouth and firmly planted her lips on his. He offered no resistance, giving in fully to the exchange. As before, she was overwhelmed by her own heated response.
He moaned and, pushing his tongue into her mouth, gained control of the exchange.
Even as their bodies moved against each other, she didn’t know what had prompted her to ask him to kiss her. Instinct, she suspected. Survival. He was the anesthetic, the drug that would help ease her through this agony. His kiss was the promise that she could, would, feel again. The reassurance her heart demanded and craved.
Again and again he kissed her. But then he pulled back, as if easing away in a slow deliberate process before addiction set in, while she waged a silent war, seeking, wanting, needing more of him.
Clark was refusing her. Her pride would have been badly bruised if she had not been aware of how difficult it was for him to maintain control.
“No more,” he gasped between labored breaths, sounding like a man on the rack, crying for mercy. He groaned and lifted his face toward the ceiling, exposing his throat. She kissed him there, pressing her lips to the underside of his jaw, her tongue exploring the taste and feel of his skin.
He rewarded her with a soft moan. He reached behind her, and she didn’t know what he was doing until the television abruptly went silent and she realized he held the remote control in his hand.
He set the remote aside, then glanced at his wrist and swore under his breath. “I have to get back to the office.”
She barely recognized her own voice. “Now?”
“Yes, now.”
This time his rejection did hurt, but she pretended otherwise. She dropped her arms and scrambled up from the carpet as though she hadn’t a care in the world, as if this little interlude had meant nothing to her.
Clark stood with far less enthusiasm. “Will you be all right?”
“Me?” she asked, as though it was a foolish question. “Of course.”
He didn’t believe her, and his eyes said as much.
“I’ve got a million things to do. Groceries, errands…” she said, counting them off on her fingers.
“Carol,” he said, stopping her. “I mean it.”
“So do I. I feel great. You haven’t got a thing to worry about.”
He held her gaze for a long time, as if gauging the truth of her words. Good old-fashioned pride saved her. As she had for months, she pretended she was unaffected, unscathed and at peace.
She almost wished she hadn’t.
He left soon afterward, and she moved to her window and watched him drive away. Using him as a buffer had been wrong. He deserved better. She liked Clark, always had. Even before they became friends, she’d taken his side. Since working for Softline, she’d discovered she more than liked him. She’d come to appreciate him.
Clark Rusbach was quite possibly the best friend she had.
* * *
“Hi, Mom, hi, Dad,” Carol said into the telephone. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Carol, sweetheart. How are you?”
“Wonderful. Great.” A small lie, but one she could rattle off without guilt. “I’m subbing at Ballard High School this week, teaching English and PE. I’m loving it.”
“What about your job at Softline?”
“I’m working there, too. They’ve been wonderful, giving me whatever days I need when the school district phones.”
“You’re spending the day alone? Thanksgiving?”
Her mother made it sound like a fate worse than death. “I already told you—Clark’s family invited me over.”
“Clark’s your new boyfriend.”
Carol had stopped counting the number of times she’d explained otherwise. “We’re just friends.” And they were. Good friends. She’d never experienced this kind of friendship with anyone else, male or female. While the Door Handle project continued to consume much of his day, he found pockets of time to be with her. He seemed to possess the uncanny ability to know exactly when she needed a friend most.
Following the September Sunday when she’d brazenly thrown herself at him, they both avoided any physical contact. She appreciated the wisdom of keeping their relationship strictly platonic. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help wondering…
“I like Clark,” her father said.
“You’ve never met him,” Carol said. Her father would champion any man, even Bozo the clown, as long as he wasn’t Eddie.
“I don’t need to. I’m just grateful you didn’t marry that bum.”
“Harry,” her mother chastised.
“I know, I know, you don’t want me to remind her of Eddie,” her father muttered. “As far as I’m concerned, she had a lucky escape. I don’t care how good a football player he is, Eddie Shapiro is no gentleman.”
While Carol agreed with him in principle, she couldn’t force herself to admit it outright. Thoughts of Eddie still followed her like dark shadows. Try as she might to not think about him, not a day went by that she didn’t think about him. Much of the anger had passed. She wished him well—at least she hoped she did. The only thing she hadn’t been able to find was acceptance.
Each time the phone rang, her heart leaped and she prayed against all reason that it was Eddie. She’d stopped counting the times she was convinced she’d seen him on the street, or heard his voice across a crowded room. Each time a small flicker of hope and joy would fire to life, then quickly fade as reality set in.
“Harry, please,” said her mother. “Can we not talk about Eddie?”
Her father muttered something Carol couldn’t make out. “I’m going to have a wonderful day,” she said, forcing enthusiasm into her voice. “So don’t worry about me.”
“You’ll be home for Christmas?”
“I’ll be there.” By hook or by crook she would find a way to s
hare the holiday with her family. “Give my love to everyone,” she said, trying hard to remain cheerful. “And eat extra turkey for me.”
The goodbyes were especially difficult. She had missed Thanksgiving with her family before. But this year it was different, and her parents recognized it as keenly as she did herself.
Clark arrived just before noon to pick her up for dinner. He’d trimmed his hair and was dressed casually in an Irish cable-knit sweater and gray slacks. Carol did a double take, barely recognizing him. He looked good—different, although she couldn’t say what it was. She found herself staring, perplexed by what was happening, and when he frowned, she quickly turned away.
“I made an apple pie,” she said.
“Wow. I didn’t know you baked.”
She was pleased to see that she’d impressed him. “My mother insisted I learn two things before I left for college. How to bake an apple pie and the proper way of cutting up a chicken.”
“The important things in life,” he teased.
“They are!” she said, perhaps a bit too defensively.
“Hey,” he said with a smile, and held up both hands. “I’m agreeing with you.”
He opened the car door for her and then carefully placed the plastic-covered pie in the back seat. While Carol was grateful for the invitation to Thanksgiving dinner, she couldn’t help being curious about his parents. He rarely mentioned them. She suspected they were older versions of him. Successful genius types. Her one fear was that the entire dinner conversation would revolve around things she couldn’t even pronounce, much less understand.
She couldn’t have been more wrong. His parents were as normal as her own. She might have suspected he was adopted if it wasn’t for the physical similarity between him and his father.
Nadine Rusbach zeroed in on Carol’s train of thought almost immediately. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, as she opened the oven door and tested the turkey.
“You do?” The comment caught Carol unawares, before she could disguise her thoughts.
“Don’t worry,” Nadine said, closing the oven door. “Everyone wonders how it is that two perfectly ordinary people like Sam and me could have spawned Clark.”
Carol was fascinated.
“We knew our son wasn’t going to be like other children when he started reading at the age of two.”
While Carol had never questioned Clark’s brilliance, she hadn’t been aware of how intellectually superior he actually was. She thought once again about the fact that, unlike Eddie, he didn’t need to boast about his talents to anyone who would listen.
“He didn’t fit in with the kids at school, and he could have gone to college when he was thirteen, but we talked it over with him and decided against it. Sam and I wanted him to have as normal a childhood as possible.”
Clark stuck his head into the kitchen. “Are you telling tales, Mom?”
Nadine smiled warmly at her son. “Of course. Why don’t you take Carol downstairs and show her your first computer?”
“Mom, Carol doesn’t want—”
“Of course I do.” She loved the idea of getting a look at his childhood firsthand.
“All right,” he said. “Just remember, you asked for this.”
He led her downstairs into the basement and flipped a switch, bathing the area in warm light. Leading her past the washer and dryer, he escorted her into what might have been a workshop. Only it wasn’t tools that lined the walls, but diagrams that resembled hopelessly entangled fishing lines. The workbench held a large, now obsolete computer.
“That’s Melba,” he said.
“You named your computer?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
She assumed he was serious until she saw the twinkle in his eye. “If I named mine,” she said with a smile, “it would be something like Beelzebub.”
He chuckled. “Melba took on the personality of a demon more than once. When I built her for my sixth-grade science—”
“You built her, er, it?”
He nodded and went on with his tale. While she listened, her gaze roamed the workroom. Tucked between the diagrams was a small color photograph. There was something vaguely familiar about it.
“What’s that?” she asked when he’d finished his story.
“What?”
“That.” She pointed.
“Just a picture,” he returned nonchalantly.
“Can I see it?”
He hesitated, something she had rarely seen him do. “I guess, although I don’t understand why you’re so curious.”
She didn’t understand, either, until he reached across the bench, unpinned the photograph and handed it to her.
She frowned as she stared into her own smiling face. She was on the football field, pom-poms in her hands. The camera had caught her in midair, arms and legs akimbo, her body like a giant X. The wind had whipped her hair behind her until it looked almost as if she were flying. “That’s me,” she whispered, completely stumped about when the shot had been taken.
“Yes, I know.” He sounded bored, and eager to move on to another topic.
She stared at the photo. It wasn’t recent. Not from the last couple of years, of that she was sure. Her freshman year? Sophomore?
“I took it,” Clark admitted, as if confessing to a crime.
She raised her gaze to his. “When?”
“The first time I saw you.”
Although it was entirely possible that he had attended Queen Anne’s football games, she couldn’t remember ever seeing him there.
“When was that?” It embarrassed her that she continued to be mesmerized by her own image, but she couldn’t stop staring at her own innocence. How happy she’d been, carefree, and full of enthusiasm for life and all that it held in store for her. Her eyes shone brightly; her joy spilled over. She realized now that the photograph had been taken her freshman year before she’d started dating Eddie. Light-years ago.
“Did I really look like this?”
“You still do,” he returned, seemingly surprised by her question.
“I do?” She wasn’t fishing for compliments, but she no longer viewed herself in the same way. Eddie had robbed her of her happiness, stolen it like a thief in the night. If that wasn’t tragic enough, she’d given him permission to do so. Every day she allowed him into her thoughts, allowed herself to hope, to believe, that he wanted her back, he continued to rob her of her appreciation for life.
“You’re beautiful, Carol.”
Clark wasn’t a man who handed out compliments indiscriminately. She couldn’t recall his mentioning how she looked one way or another in all the months they’d been friends. And now he tucked his finger beneath her chin and with maddening slowness lowered his lips to hers.
The kiss was gentle, devoid of passion. A friendly exchange. Nevertheless, she felt its impact all the way to her toenails. Her eyes fluttered open when he raised his head. Releasing a deep sigh, she offered him a feeble smile.
“I think you might be the best friend I’ve ever had,” she said.
He smiled. A rare smile that lit up his eyes. “We’d better get back upstairs before my parents decide to eat without us.”
She nodded, and when he reached for her hand, their fingers intertwined.
She first heard his parents when she was halfway up the staircase.
“I’m telling you, Nadine, she’s the one.”
“Sam, please, don’t do or say anything to embarrass Clark.”
“Me? I’d never do that.” A short pause. “Not intentionally.”
“Thank you for that.”
“We’re going to have magnificent grandchildren, sweetheart. With her looks and athletic abilities and Clark’s brains—what a combination.”
Carol could feel her face growing hotter by the moment.
Clark stopped her on the stairs. “We better let them know we’re coming,” he said.
Chapter 4
When Carol booked her airline tickets to spend Ch
ristmas with her parents, her spirits lifted considerably. Spending the holidays with her family and all that was familiar was sure to ease the disappointments and frustrations of the past year. She had been away from those she loved for far too long.
On a Tuesday a couple of weeks before Christmas, she sat in the Softline cafeteria finishing the last of her lunch. But her mind wasn’t on her chicken-salad sandwich. It was on her two older brothers and their families. Both Jeff and Jerry were married and had children of their own. She enjoyed being an auntie to her two nieces and her nephew. And although she dearly loved Seattle, it would be good to be home again.
Sipping the last of her tea, she was about to return to work when Mrs. Derby, Clark’s secretary, approached her.
The older woman greeted her with a rare display of warmth. Mrs. Derby wasn’t the chatty friendly sort. What made her such an excellent assistant was her dedication to duty. And to Clark.
Carol returned her greeting, and for a moment, an irrational fear took hold that somehow Mrs. Derby had unearthed a soy-sauce stain on her desk. She smiled when she realized how ridiculous she was being. Clark would have covered for her.
Her thoughts brightened at the thought of him. They saw each other on a fairly regular basis these days. They’d come to rely on each other, although she recognized that she derived far more from the relationship than he did.
In her own way she’d tried to thank him for being her friend. She’d helped him Christmas-shop for his parents and Mrs. Derby, and he’d done the same for her. They never did make it to the ballroom dancing classes. The one evening he was free to accompany her, he had arrived, looking tired and worn to a frazzle. He’d wanted to know how much it would cost him to get out of it. She had laughed, hugged him, and let him off easy with pizza in front of the television.
It surprised her how often they laughed together. A few months earlier she never would have guessed that he had such a wonderful wry sense of humor. She appreciated his wit and wondered how it was that no one else had recognized it during their four years of college.
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