by Amy Andrews
And, despite knowing logically it was better this way, the pain in her gut grew bigger.
TEN
Bad news travelled fast, and Cassie spent the next week taking phone calls from her concerned friends, assuring them that she was fine, that it was for the best. That she and Tuck had only ever been a temporary sexual thing and he’d got too emotionally involved.
And she believed it. In her head.
But the gnawing pain just didn’t seem to go away, no matter how much she ate. On top of that a heaviness had taken up residence in her chest. And once again her work was shot. But this time it wasn’t about her libido or her hormones, which was the most confusing thing—because even though she’d never really understood that at least she was familiar with it.
This was about something else entirely. It was about him. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. Memories of their time together interrupted her days and bombarded her dreams.
Their Sunday mornings together reading the papers. Sharing an evening meal and talking about their day. Their quiet companionship every night as they worked on their projects, her at the desk in the bedroom, Tuck propped against the bedhead, a game turned on low.
And the trip to Barringer. The mystery plane ride, the open-top Cadillac, exploring the crater with him, eating candy floss, their night of stargazing, opening up to him.
And the hot, wild sex under a desert night.
Yes, okay, some of her thoughts did linger on their crazy, insatiable sex-life. Because she did miss the sex too. But she’d always figured that the sex would be the thing she’d miss the most when their relationship ended.
But it wasn’t. She missed him. She missed him being around. Being right there. Filling up the spaces in the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom. Filling up the silences. She missed turning around to talk to him, to show him some miraculous cosmic image, to talk about the intricacies of her project, to ask him about his.
She hadn’t realised how silent her life had been until Tuck had been there, filling it up with light and sound and noise.
It wasn’t logical to feel this way. She never had before. It didn’t make sense.
But it wouldn’t go away either.
And then the weekend swung around and it was all that Cassie could do to drag herself out of bed on Saturday. She hadn’t been sleeping well, despite the medication, and when she did she dreamt of Tuck. It didn’t seem to matter what she did, what drug she took, how hard she worked or how late she stayed up to thoroughly exhaust herself, she couldn’t switch her brain off from thinking about him.
The last thing she felt like doing was hitting the research—and she always felt like hitting the research. She knew it would be a distraction from her thoughts, something to help get her through another long day, but when she got there a whole batch of new images had come in overnight and she found herself thinking about Tuck even more. One of them was an ultraviolet image of a star cluster on the edge of the solar system, and it reminded her of the blue of Tuck’s eyes so much she lost her breath.
She itched to ring him. To tell him about the majesty and beauty of the pictures. He’d been as fascinated by the images on her laptop as she had, and this image more than any other seemed to resonate with her.
It was like staring straight into his blue, blue gaze.
Damn it.
At three o’clock Cassie gave up trying to be productive and headed for home. The next six weeks stretched ahead interminably, and she hated that what should have been the highlight of her life had completely lost its lustre. She would forever look back on it and think not of her exciting time in one of the great cradles of learning but of Tuck.
The only consolation, as she put one foot in front of the other, was that she got to go back to the apartment instead of the dorm. At least she could be miserable in solitude.
When she got in she stripped off her leggings and fell into bed. Utter exhaustion finally took over and, as her head hit the pillow, she fell headlong into a dark and troubled sleep. Elusive images of Tuck and her mother intertwined with deep-space images so they seemed to float in a galaxy of stars, and every time she reached out to touch him, to touch her mother, they disappeared in her hand like rainbow mist.
It took the simultaneous beating on her door and the ringing of her mobile phone a few hours later to yank her out of the increasingly distressing dream. She woke with a start, her heart pounding, disorientated for a few moments. Then the noises started to filter in and she leapt from the bed, heading for the door, collecting her ringing phone on the way and answering it.
‘Hello?’ she said as she walked.
‘It’s us!’ A chorus of voices reverberated through her ear.
‘We’re at your door,’ Reese said.
‘Let us in,’ Gina demanded.
Cassie faltered for a moment as she neared the door, then hurried to open it, the phone still pressed to her ear.
A cheer of, ‘Surprise!’ and a cacophony of party horns greeted her. Cassie hit the ‘end’ button on her phone just in time as her gal pals descended upon her, pulling her into a group hug.
‘We’ve come to get you drunk,’ Gina said, waving two bottles of champagne in the air.
Marnie, her perky blonde ponytail swinging, frowned at Gina. ‘We’ve come to cheer you up,’ she clarified, and Cassie guessed things were still a little cool between the two women.
‘How are you, hon?’ Reese said, hugging her hard again. ‘My cousin’s obviously been hit too many times in the head.’ She pulled back. ‘I could probably get Mason to send around some of his Marine buddies and rough him up a little, if you like?’
Cassie was temporarily speechless. She’d been struggling along for over a week now, pretending she was okay, but just having her oldest friends here made her feel as if she actually was going to be okay. That she was going to be able to survive this thing she didn’t even understand.
It had never occurred to her to call them to her side, but she was so glad they were here. Tears sprang to her eyes. She blinked them away—for Pete’s sake, she never cried!
‘We have movies,’ Marnie said, holding up three DVDs that looked distinctly science-fictiony.
‘And we’re ordering pizza,’ Reese added. ‘Do you have a local number? I can’t believe Tuck wouldn’t,’ she said, wandering off to investigate the fridge for a magnet or a menu.
Gina looked around and whistled. ‘Nice digs. You scored well. Did he leave anything we could trash?’
Cassie shook her head, feeling more tears threaten. ‘Every thing’s gone.’
Gina hugged her. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘We’ll trash talk about him on social media instead, like all good ex-girlfriends. Now, come on—where are your glasses?’
Cassie was swept up in the noise and light that was the Awesome Foursome and it felt good to be part of them again. To be part of their circle, to feel their love, to know that they’d slay dragons for her.
Or at least contribute to the hire of a hit-man.
And they didn’t talk about Tuck—not to start with anyway. They drank champagne and toasted friendship and regaled Cassie with stories of their own recent lives while they waited for the pizza to be delivered. But as they sat at the table to eat the questioning began.
Gina went first. ‘You want to talk about it?’ she asked in her usual blunt manner.
Cassie didn’t know. She’d certainly listened to enough tales of woe and break-up stories from her friends over the year she
’d lived with them to know talking about it was what you were supposed to do. But it really hadn’t been a position she’d envisaged herself in.
‘Not really.’
‘Was it the newspaper article?’ Marnie asked, extending her hand and placing it over Cassie’s forearm where it lay on the table.
Cassie shook her head. ‘I don’t care about some stupid headline in some stupid gossip rag.’
‘No…I meant the paternity suit,’ Marnie said as she gently squeezed Cassie’s wrist.
‘No.’ Cassie withdrew her arm and reached for a slice of pepperoni pizza. ‘I don’t care about that either. And it’s been dropped anyway.’
The women all looked at each other as Cassie bit into her pizza. ‘Did he snore?’ Marnie asked.
‘Drop his wet towels on the floor?’ Reese suggested.
‘Pick his teeth at the table?’ Gina said.
‘I know,’ Marnie said. ‘He was vulgar with his money.’
Reese snorted. ‘Hardly. I know… I bet he treated you like some Texan princess—a china doll.’
‘Or maybe he was just lousy in bed?’ Gina said.
Cassie almost choked on her pizza at the last suggestion, necessitating some back-bashing action from Gina.
Reese pushed Cassie’s champagne towards her and said, ‘Drink.’
When Cassie had her voice back she said, ‘He did none of those things. He had perfect manners with food and his money and was well house-trained. And he most definitely was not lousy in bed. The man achieved the impossible with me. Time and again.’
Cassie’s belly looped the loop at the thought of how many times Tuck had brought her to orgasm.
‘Damn, I knew he’d be good,’ Gina said wistfully.
Marnie shot her a quelling look. ‘So what did happen?’
Cassie sighed at her well-intentioned friends gazing back at her, wanting to help. Wanting to understand
so they could make things better. And who knew? Maybe they could. This was obviously a time when EQ, which they all had in spades, trumped IQ, which she had in spades but obviously meant zip.
‘He told me he loved me.’
Marnie looked at her, puzzled. Gina and Reese exchanged an eyebrow-raise. Yep. Definitely an EQ thing.
‘That’s…it?’ Reese asked.
‘But…that’s a good thing, Cass,’ Marnie said gently.
Reese nodded. ‘Most available women on this continent—hell, most of the unavailable ones too—would kill to hear those words come out of Samuel Tucker’s mouth.’
Cassie threw down her half-eaten piece of pizza. ‘I’m not most women. I never have been. You all know that.’
They nodded in unison. Truer words had never been spoken.
Cassie downed her champagne in one swallow. ‘I don’t fall in love. I don’t believe in love. It’s the most illogical, irrational…thing…in the entire universe. So much time and effort and money is wasted on it. Trying to achieve it, trying to keep it. We’d have a cure for cancer or poverty or a manned flight to Mars by now if people just channelled the same amount of energy into important things that they do into something as fanciful as love.’
‘No such thing as love?’ Marnie blanched. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in it like you didn’t believe in God or unicorns or pots of gold at the ends of rainbows. Not that you seriously denied its existence.’ She took a sip of her champagne. ‘What about the love a mother has for her newborn baby?’
‘That’s evolution,’ Cassie dismissed. ‘Mothers are pre-conditioned to love. It hones their protective instincts to keep their offspring alive in the world so they can go on to continue the species. But what purpose is there for romantic love?’ Cassie demanded.
‘Procreation?’ Marnie said.
Cassie shook her head. ‘Survival of the species is maintained perfectly well without it in all species except humans.’
‘Sometimes not even then,’ said Gina, ever the cynic.
‘How about just because it feels good?’ Reese murmured.
Cassie snorted. ‘Lots of things feel good.’ Sex with Tuck had felt exceptionally good. ‘Doesn’t mean it’s good for us. Feeling good is not a reason to do something.’
Reese blinked. ‘Why not?’
‘Because then we only do the things we want instead of the things we need to do. It’s not conducive to the survival of the fittest.’
The women fell silent at an impasse they didn’t seem to be able to bridge.
‘Come on,’ Gina said after a moment or two, filling their glasses again. ‘We’re not here to be downers. We’re here to cheer you up. Let’s go and watch some movies. We even rented the first three Star Treks, just for you.’
Cassie watched as the bubbles in her champagne rose to the surface. She picked up her glass and raised it towards her friends. ‘Thank you for all coming. I know this touchy-feely stuff isn’t my forte, but I’m glad you’re here dishing it out anyway. And I’m touched that you hired my favourite movies. I know you’d all rather stick yourself in the eye with a hot poker.’
‘Cheers to that,’ Gina muttered as she clinked her glass with Cassie’s. ‘Now, let’s get this party started.’
By the time the credits had rolled on the third movie it was well after midnight, the two bottles of champagne were gone and they’d emptied two more bottles of wine Gina had discovered on a wire rack inside the pantry.
‘Well, that’s eight hours of my life I’m never going to get back,’ Gina said as she stretched out on the bed.
They’d all piled into the king-sized bed to watch the DVDs on the big screen.
‘Feeling better now?’ Marnie asked as she glanced at Cassie.
Cassie nodded. ‘Yes. Thank you.’ And she did. A night with her gal pals had taken her mind off Tuck. She’d even laughed through Gina and Reese’s alternative running commentary of the movie. ‘Thank you for coming.’
She felt as if she’d gained some perspective, having her friends around. There was no need to feel so overwhelmed by things she didn’t understand when she had such great women in her life—at the end of a telephone.
‘I was feeling sorry for myself. But not any more.’
‘You look better,’ Marnie said.
‘I feel much stronger,’ Cassie agreed.
‘Good. Our work here is done.’ Reese smiled, settling down onto her pillow. ‘Now, turn the lights out and let’s get some sleep. We’ve got a long drive back to New York in the morning and none of us are nineteen any more.’
Cassie reached out and flipped off the lights and was greeted by a chorus of gasps. She looked up at hundreds of stars glowing down at her.
‘Wow,’ Gina said.
‘Cassie,’ Marnie whispered. ‘It’s beautiful. Did you do that?’
Cassie felt her eyes fill with tears and the stars grew halos, then they danced and twisted as they refracted through the rapidly building moisture.
‘No,’ she said, her voice wobbly. ‘Tuck did.’
Suddenly the pain in her stomach reached excruciating levels, and then it exploded with such force it took her breath away. A sob rose in her throat and she choked on it as her lungs fought for space inside a chest welling with sensation. Another sob rose, and then another, until she was full-on crying.
So much for feeling stronger.
Reese sat up. ‘Cassie?’
The others followed suit. Marnie reached over and flicked the light back on. They stared at their friend, not sure what to do
or say. They’d never seen Cassie cry. It had only been tonight they’d seen her in any kind of emotional quandary at all.
‘Cassie?’ Gina said, hauling Cassie upright and pulling her into a big hug, stroking her hair.
‘What’s wrong, honey?’ Reese murmured, rubbing Cassie’s back.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ Cassie howled into Gina’s neck. But it was scaring the hell out of her. This loss of control was eerily similar to that torrid time in her teens, and she was frightened she was losing her mind. ‘I don’t cry. I never cry. I want it to stop.’
‘It’s okay,’ Marnie added. ‘You cry all you want. Crying’s good. It’s natural in this sort of situation. Trust me, I know it’s not big in geek land, but sometimes, as a woman, there’s nothing that beats a good old-fashioned howl.’
This was natural? Cassie couldn’t believe that something so preposterous could be true. But none of her friends was looking at her as if she was going crazy, and nor did she seem to be able to stop.
‘Really?’ she sobbed.
Everyone nodded, and somehow she felt reassured that this was part and parcel of whatever the hell was happening to her, not a spiral into something deep and dark, so she just kept her head on Gina’s shoulder and let every single tear fall free.
Twenty minutes later the tears had settled to some hiccoughy sighs, and Cassie pulled herself off Gina’s shoulder. Reese handed her a wad of tissues. ‘Thanks,’ Cassie said. ‘I seriously don’t know what’s come over me lately.’
‘Have you ever thought,’ Gina said, approaching the subject gently, ‘maybe you love him?’
Reese and Marnie looked at each other, stunned that such a thought had come from Gina, who had declared herself pretty much divorced from the emotion herself.
Cassie shook her head again. ‘No. I told you I don’t believe in love.’
‘Well, sometimes that doesn’t really matter,’ Reese said, jumping in. God knew, she’d been whammied by love at a most inconvenient time. ‘Some of the world’s most sane and sensible women have fallen under its influence.’
