Moondance

by Judith Arnold

  Cory was never home when Talia returned from her job. Talia hadn’t known when his last class of the day ended, but surely he should have been finished by nine-thirty at night. “I have to stay into the evenings,” he’d explained. “That’s when all the networking happens.”

  Right. He’d been networking with his classmates and professors over pitchers of beer or bottles of whiskey. He’d been strolling through galleries and attending performances and probably smoking as much pot as his mother, and then staggering home past midnight and explaining that this was the way the art world operated, that if she could just hang on until he graduated, he’d find a job and it would be her turn to go to college.

  “And who’s going to take care of Wendy while you’re working and I’m in school?” she’d shouted. “Your druggy mom?”

  “Be patient, would you?” he’d responded. “Have some faith. It’ll all work out.”

  Right. It all worked out because she’d packed up and left.

  It wasn’t a marvelous night for a moondance, she told herself. It wasn’t a marvelous morning for a sun dance. It was just another day. Her daughter was at school, Talia ought to be at work, and Cory ought to be somewhere that wasn’t her house. Bad enough he was in Brogan’s Point for the week. He didn’t have to be in her kitchen, looking so freaking sexy and making her remember not just the fights and the resentments but the kisses, the passion, the love that had once bound them.

  “When you move your mother, let me know,” she said. “I’ll find someone to help her.” Then she gathered their mugs and the napkin full of orange rind, carried them to the sink, and busied herself cleaning up. With her back to Cory, she could almost pretend he wasn’t there.

  Almost.

  Chapter Seven

  He’d never even gotten to the “I’m sorry” part, let alone the part about his moving to Boston.

  Damn.

  He stood on the front porch, blinking in the morning sun. Talia hadn’t exactly kicked him out, but she’d made clear that she wanted him to leave. And he didn’t have time to hang around, anyway. As it was, he was probably going to be late for his ten o’clock appointment with the real estate broker in the city.

  He’d just thought he would stop by, tell Talia about his possible relocation, tell her he hoped they could get along well and make this work for Wendy’s sake…

  Like hell. He’d wanted to see Talia because he’d seen her all night long in his mind, in his dreams. Because a romantic old rock song had gotten lodged inside his brain, and it made him want her, and he’d needed to know if the song was still lodged inside her brain, as well, if those steamy kisses they’d shared had meant anything to her. Because when he thought of moving to Boston, he thought…

  Damn. He hadn’t known her house was so big and inviting. Too big for her to live in all by herself, certainly. And located a reasonable commuting distance to Boston. Somewhere in that big, inviting house, Talia had a bed. Cory wondered if it was big enough for them to share.

  That was a patently stupid thought.

  Still, the house was impressive. A lot more spacious than his overpriced Brooklyn apartment.

  Wendy had never gone into much detail in describing the house to him during her visits. Of course, he’d never pressed her for information about the place. When she’d been with him, he hadn’t wanted her thinking about Brogan’s Point and getting homesick, wishing she could sleep in her own bed, surrounded by her familiar toys, under the same roof as her mother. The less she’d thought about Talia during her weekends with Cory, the better.

  He wasn’t sure why he’d felt he ought to apologize to Talia, but that had been high on his to-do list as he’d driven from the inn to her house that morning. He was no expert when it came to women, but he did know they liked being apologized to. Talia was angry with him—for knocking her up, for failing to be the husband she’d wanted, for moving her into his mother’s house when her own parents had given her the boot, for doing his fricking best to earn a degree so he’d be able to support her and Wendy. Who the hell knew why? Fifteen years ago, he’d done his best, and it hadn’t been good enough. If apologizing would smooth the path before him and Talia, and especially their daughter, he’d apologize.

  But he hadn’t gotten around to that. As soon as he’d seen Talia in that sexy wine-colored robe, his original plan had evaporated. He’d seen her soft, dark hair still mussed from sleep, and her slim, bare legs, and her slender throat, visible above the drooping neckline of the T-shirt she’d had on under the robe, and all he could think of was kissing her again, kissing her the way he’d kissed her last night—only this time, he wouldn’t stop.

  Peeling an orange and talking about her grandmother had helped to subdue his hunger for her. Not completely, but enough to keep him from embarrassing himself. If he’d kissed her again, she might have rejected him, slapped him, shoved him out the door. So he’d focused on the most unsexy subjects: her grandmother, his mother, and orange peel.

  Now here he was, stranded on her front steps, any hopes of a kiss shot to hell. At least she hadn’t shoved him out the door. She’d just told him she had a lot of work to do, and he’d better check with Wendy before making any dinner plans, since whatever the plans were, Wendy would likely want them to include Anthony.

  He strode down the front walk to his car, climbed in, and pulled out his cell phone. He punched the number for Shirley Boursilis, the broker he was supposed to meet. “I’m just leaving Brogan’s Point now,” he told her once she answered. “You probably have a better idea than I do about when I’ll get to your office.”

  “At this hour, it should take you about forty-five minutes,” Shirley said. He’d spoken to her several times from New York, and she always sounded cheerful and bubbly. “Don’t waste time looking for a parking space on the street. You’ll never find one. Just pull into the building’s garage. I’ll validate your parking ticket.”

  As Shirley had predicted, it took him about forty-five minutes to reach the city—and another fifteen minutes of driving in circles until he located the entrance to the garage of the office tower that housed the real estate firm where she worked. He’d been warned that Boston wasn’t the most driver-friendly city in the world, and now he knew this for a fact. The roads twisted and curved. One-way signs, oddly shaped intersections, and streets that changed name from one block to the next thwarted him. Even his GPS seemed confused.

  Eventually, however, he found the garage entrance, pulled in, and let out a long breath. At least driving in Boston had succeeded in distracting him from thoughts of Talia for a while.

  Shirley looked the way she sounded—cheerful and energetic. He guessed her to be in her forties, trim and bouncy, her blond hair short and neat and her make-up low-key. She had a booming voice and an exuberant handshake. He wondered how much coffee she’d consumed in the past couple of hours. She definitely seemed to be riding a caffeine high.

  “We’ve got lots of places to look at,” she said once a secretary had stamped his parking card. “Let’s get going, shall we?”

  They rode the elevator back down to the garage and climbed into Shirley’s Volvo sedan. Unlike Cory, she had no difficulty navigating the convoluted streets of Boston. “So, explain to me again—your company makes cartoons?”

  “We do graphic design,” he said. “We create logos, we produce videos—whatever our clients want. We do hand-designed work and CGI work—computer graphics. A lot of boutique ad agencies don’t want to support a full design team, so they hire us. And TV stations, web designers…we’ve designed trailers for indie movies. Whatever the clients want.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve got some listings that are more business-y and some that are more artsy. You can let me know what will work best for Tek-Palette.”

  Their first few stops were office suites in downtown high-rises. Obviously, these were the “business-y” rentals. They were pricy, and they seemed better suited to law or accounting firms than a graphic design company. After stopping
at a café for a quick lunch—Shirley washed down her sandwich with three cups of coffee, Cory noted, bracing himself for her to be even bouncier and bubblier as the afternoon wore on—they headed back out to look at more properties.

  The real estate search improved when Shirley drove him over a bridge and into Cambridge, where they inspected a site in Kendall Square, which had a nice high-tech vibe but prices as astronomically high as Boston’s. From there, they drove north into the city of Somerville. “They’re doing lots of revitalization here,” she told him. “Renovating old buildings and converting them into office space. I’ve got a really interesting listing in your price range that might be what you’re looking for.”

  Tufts University straddled the town line between Somerville and the adjacent town of Medford. If Cory ended up working in Somerville, he could meet Wendy for lunch sometimes, or attend campus events with her—assuming she wanted her father anywhere near her once she was a hot-shot university student.

  Whether the renovated old brick building Shirley drove him to was anywhere near the campus, he couldn’t say. The building might have been a mill a hundred years ago, but its interior had been gutted and modernized. Cory and Shirley rode an elevator to the third floor, and she led him into a large open space, lined on one wall with tall windows. The walls were brick, the ceiling high.

  Cory immediately warmed to the place. The natural light spilling in through the windows was a plus, but not all that necessary, given that if Tek-Palette opened a satellite office in the Boston area, they’d furnish it with top-of-the-line lighting. More important than the natural light was the space’s size, configuration, and wiring. Tek-Palette relied as much on computers as on drafting tables.

  “You could fit a lot of work stations in this space,” Shirley pointed out. “How many people are you thinking of bringing to this office?”

  “Three or four graphic artists to begin with,” he told her. “Space for an intern or two. Marketing people. An administrative assistant. We’d need a conference room with a screen, a small reception area, a sales office, studio, lab, storage. I think we could fit it in here.”

  “You could set up a screening area here.” She gestured toward one end of the room, where the windows ended and the walls were solid, allowing no outdoor light in. “You could also set up a kitchen area if you’d like. The zoning can accommodate that, if you want to have a snack room with a mini-fridge, microwave, that kind of thing. Of course, there are lots of restaurants within a block or two,” Shirley rattled on. “The T-stop is two blocks away. There’s good bus service, too. Clients won’t think of Somerville as a remote outpost. This is a cool city, moving up. Lots of young professionals gravitate to Somerville.” Her gaze conveyed that she considered him a young professional.

  I’m the father of a high school graduate, he almost said. But then, when you became a father at the age of nineteen, you could be the father of a high school graduate and still a young professional. Young-ish, anyway. When he thought about Talia, he felt like a teenager again, the kid who’d laid eyes on her at a party and gotten turned on.

  He willfully shoved her out of his thoughts. “I like it,” he said. “This place could work for us.”

  “I’ve got a folder with photos and all the specs in my car,” she told him. “I know you have to report back to your people in New York. You understand, don’t you,” she continued as they headed out the door and into the corridor, “that if you move here, you may have to shift your loyalties from the Yankees to the Red Sox?” She laughed as she said this.

  “I grew up in Rhode Island,” he told her. “I think I can manage that.”

  Once Shirley returned him to the garage beneath her office building in downtown Boston, she presented him with a thick folder full of information about the Somerville property. He accepted the folders she had for a couple of the other properties they’d looked at, too, so he’d be able to compare the venues and provide his partners in New York with a complete analysis.

  Tek-Palette was a small company, and everything was discussed by everyone. But the partners ultimately made the decisions. He’d have to make sure he was persuasive in his evaluation. Because he really wanted to open a Boston branch. He wanted this to happen. He wanted to move here.

  For Wendy, he told himself. He wanted to be near his daughter. And his mother, given her ailments and infirmities.

  Living near Talia had nothing to do with it.

  Chapter Eight

  “I hope you don’t mind that I invited Dad for dinner,” Wendy said. She was busy tearing romaine lettuce into a salad bowl beside the kitchen sink while Talia checked the chicken breasts she’d been marinating. She had defrosted four breasts, figuring that Anthony would be joining her and Wendy for dinner, but it turned out the parents of the perpetually ravenous boy had requested his presence for dinner at their house. So Talia had more than enough food for Wendy and herself.

  She had enough to include Cory, who—no surprise—had accepted Wendy’s dinner invitation.

  She shot Wendy a quick look, then slid the roasting pan into the oven. “I know you want to spend time with him this week. And we’ve got plenty of food.”

  “But…?” Wendy eyed her mother, expecting more.

  “I just don’t want you thinking all this togetherness is going to change anything.”

  Wendy’s already large eyes grew even larger. Then she hooted a laugh. “You and Dad were actually in the same room at the same time last night. That’s a change.”

  Talia avoided her daughter’s probing stare by busying herself arranging some heat-and-serve rolls on a cookie sheet. She and Wendy rarely ate bread with their meals, but Talia had learned, thanks to Anthony, that some men liked that extra starch. Of course, Anthony seemed happy to eat everything within his reach. Talia sympathized with his parents, who had three other sons as well, and who undoubtedly spent staggering amounts of money keeping their boys from starving to death.

  She had no idea if Cory liked bread with his meal. Had he eaten much naan yesterday at Punjab Palace? She couldn’t remember. She’d been in shock. But she wasn’t in shock today, and she would put a basket of warm rolls on the table. No matter what else was or was not going on between her and her former husband, she knew how to serve a man a filling meal.

  She wasn’t sure why she felt so determined to feed Cory well. Or why she’d made sure she was dressed nicely—not in her Red Sox T-shirt, not in the shirt she’d slept in, but in an embroidered cotton blouse and a short denim skirt, and leather sandals instead of flip-flops or sneakers. At least she hadn’t bothered with make-up. If she had, Wendy would have noticed and made something of it, but Talia assured herself that wasn’t the main reason she’d skipped mascara and lipstick. She’d done without make-up because she was under no obligation to look good for Cory. Whatever weirdness had happened last night wasn’t going to happen again. Whatever attraction she’d felt toward him that morning, as they’d shared the clementine and talked about her grandmother, meant nothing.

  “I wasn’t pleased that you sprang him on me last night,” she said as she scrubbed and trimmed a broccoli crown. “You could have given me some warning.”

  “He’s my father,” Wendy pointed out, her voice tight. “I didn’t think you needed to be warned just because you were going to see him.”

  Wendy knew damned well she should have warned Talia. Typical defensiveness on her part: instead of admitting she was wrong, she attacked with nuclear-powered sarcasm.

  In this case, Talia didn’t have a handy rejoinder. She imagined that most divorced spouses saw each other on occasion. In the many years she had gone without seeing Cory, she’d assured herself that should a face-to-face encounter with him occur, she could handle it without falling apart. They spoke on the phone, after all—although they emailed and texted more often than they spoke, and their conversations always revolved around Wendy. Talia had believed that, after all the years, after so much scar tissue had formed over the wounds, she could see him
without feeling anything more than gratitude for his part in creating their daughter.

  And really, she’d been doing fine last night…until that song had played on the jukebox at the Faulk Street Tavern. Just remembering the sweet romance of the lyrics sent a hot shiver down her spine.

  The awful truth was, she couldn’t think about the lyrics without seeing Cory’s face, his soulful eyes, his rugged jaw, his mouth. The mouth that had claimed hers. The warm, virile body that had held hers so close.

  She wondered if she could poison his chicken. Not enough to kill him, just enough to get him out of her life.

  He’d never be out of her life, not as long as Wendy bound them together. And his mother. Now Tina Malone was going to be back in Talia’s life, too.

  The doorbell rang. Sighing, she hunched over the sink, terribly absorbed in cutting up the broccoli. “I assume that’s your father,” she said to Wendy. “Can you let him in?”

  She had assumed correctly. In less than a minute, Wendy was ushering her father into the kitchen, babbling happily. No sarcasm for him, Talia thought with a twinge of jealousy. “Dad’s here,” Wendy announced unnecessarily. “Look what he brought you!”

  Reluctantly, Talia tore her attention from the knobby green vegetable she’d been cutting into bite-size pieces and turned from the sink. Dad was here, all right—carrying a bouquet of tulips.

  Had he remembered that she loved tulips? Or had he simply bought whatever a florist had recommended?

  “Thanks for having me for dinner,” he said, extending the flowers to her.

  All right. She’d be civil. “Thank you,” she said, accepting the bouquet. “These are very pretty.”

  “Are tulips still your favorites? You planted all those bulbs at my mother’s house.”