by Serena Bell
The sky blazed blue, as clear as it ever got. They’d be able to see for miles. Driving here, they’d seen the mountains, Cascades to the east, Olympics to the west, framing her world in a way she’d missed in Florida. It would be hard to imagine a more gorgeous day to be ten stories above Puget Sound, gazing across to Kitsap Peninsula, the city in relief behind them.
“Okay. You don’t have to come with us,” she told Jake hastily, and then, not wanting to sound like she was opposed to his joining them, “You’re invited, though, if you want.” To Sam, she said, “We’re going to eat our picnic first. Then I’ll take you to the Ferris wheel.”
Jake shrugged. “If I don’t go with you, I have to do laundry.”
But his eyes caught hers, and she understood that his feelings were not unlike her own. That he was balanced at the same strange tipping point, that he also wanted to resist, that he was doing no better a job than she was.
“I’ll just need a minute before we go—I’ve got a gym bag at the visitor center, and I can swap legs and change my T-shirt.”
“Yeah, no worries.”
She pulled out the lunch she’d packed for her and Sam. She’d made too many sandwiches, because that was what she did, and she offered one to Jake.
“No, thanks,” he said.
“My mom makes really good chicken salad,” Sam said.
“Just eat it,” she said, pinning him with a stare.
Something opened in Jake’s face, something like, but not quite, surprise. He gave her a look. There was heat behind it, heat that sank deep and rose high and filled her fast.
“Okay, then.” He said it mildly, but his eyes were still locked on hers. Her heart clamored, sending blood rushing everywhere in her body.
Then as quickly as it had happened, it was over, the connection broken. She was left with the jazzed-up, buzzy feeling of what had passed between them, the swollen warmth between her legs, the anticipation he’d started like a thrum in her veins.
Sam was looking from her face to Jake’s, trying, she guessed, to read a foreign expression on his mother’s face. She composed herself and handed him the sandwich.
Jake swallowed hard, which made her feel better. I’m not the only one.
“So tell me about your work,” he said. A stab at bringing this back to small talk and a picnic lunch and two people who were supposed to keep some distance between them. “What do you do?”
She explained to him about the app she’d designed and how she was adapting it to work with the new company’s website.
“That sounds pretty interesting.”
“It’s okay. It’s a job. The best part is the shoes.”
“The shoes?”
“We sell shoes. I’m—well, honestly, I’m kind of obsessed with shoes.”
He tipped over and peered under the table.
Today, she was wearing a pair of Converse-style high-tops with black and white, Escher-like drawings all over them. She found herself wishing they were something sexier, like her chunky-heeled sandals with a big flower on the toe.
Also, she hoped her ass looked half as good in her jeans as his looked in his.
“Those are pretty cool,” he said. “I don’t know anything about shoes, and I don’t give a crap, personally, about my own. I guess that’s a good thing.”
Silence.
Oh, right. He probably didn’t do a lot of shoe shopping, given that he was still relearning how to walk. She gave him a sideways, slightly sheepish smile, and he said, “Don’t worry about it. If I had a quarter for every awkward moment, I’d be rich. I don’t care. You can show off your shoes to me. So your company sells shoes?”
“Yeah.” She thought about her boss with a pang of anxiety. There had been no further tensions, but she felt on edge. Like she was on probation. Not unlike how her father had always made her feel, like it was only a matter of time until her less positive traits burst through. Like your mother.
“Hey. Way back, you know, before—”
She nodded.
“You wanted to be an illustrator. Of kids’ books.”
“Yeah, well. That never happened. For kind of obvious reasons.”
He frowned. “You ever draw and paint anymore?”
“Nah. No time.”
She’d showed him her work once, watercolors she’d done for a book that seemed, nearly a decade later, to be infantile in its simplicity. She hadn’t thought much about the illustrating lately, but he was right. Once upon a time, it had been all she’d wanted to do.
She remembered so clearly: He’d looked at her drawings and paintings with such seriousness. No one had ever pored over her stuff like that, like it was beautiful, like it meant something. Like he was trying to figure out everything she’d been thinking when she’d put pencil and brush to paper.
She didn’t even think she’d unpacked the box with her art supplies in it. She doubted her watercolor paints were any good anymore. Maybe she’d think about picking up some new ones. Maybe she’d dabble a little.
The sun filtered down in dribs and drabs and a breeze rustled both men’s hair. She had never thought of Sam as a man until she had seen him with Jake. Jake made it possible to imagine who Sam might become. He made it easier to see who Sam was, to see the balance between the lighthearted Sam, an echo of Jake at eighteen, and the serious Sam, an echo of this Jake.
Jake made Sam make sense.
“This sandwich is really good,” Jake said.
“Thank you.”
He’d rested both elbows on the picnic table and she admired the ridge and groove of his biceps, the way the muscles bunched and released.
“I haven’t had anything home cooked for so long. I eat a ridiculous amount of Progresso soup and beans and tuna fish.”
At twenty, he’d been a marvel of engineering, power, and beauty, every inch of him thick and hard. He’d given off the sense of something tightly leashed and barely restrained in coiled muscle, held back under the tautness of his skin. Delicious.
He was leaner now, but no less beautiful.
“I could teach you how to cook.” And my motives are totally pure. Nothing to do with wanting to watch you move around my kitchen.
“I can cook, believe it or not,” he said. “Nothing special, but I can follow a recipe. My mom was kind of a mess, so all of us cooked. I’ll cook for you sometime.”
“We don’t always eat takeout. These last couple of days—sometimes I’m too fried to cook.”
“It must be hard work, what you do,” he said.
It was hard, tougher than she’d expected. Exhausting, working and still having something good in her left to give to Sam at the end of the day. She got up early to make Sam’s lunch and stayed up late so she could clean the house and do the laundry. And there was no one to depend on but herself.
But it was good, too, the way having a newborn was hard as hell but so, so sweet.
It had been a long time since anyone had noticed or acknowledged that about her life, and it loosened something tight in her chest. There was a gentleness to him that totally went against the man she’d seen that first day in the physical therapist’s office. That went against stereotype, for sure. Of course, she’d rejected her dad’s stereotypes years ago. He was convinced that soldiers were poor, uneducated grunts tricked into fighting unjust wars for a hawkish government. Vulnerable clods at best, hawks themselves at worst.
Mira’s parents were peaceniks, like a lot of the people she’d grown up around. They held candles during vigils to ward off U.S. intervention in other countries and slapped pithy bumper stickers on their cars. As a kid, Mira herself had held candles in the dark, flanked by her parents, in protest.
But after Jake, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to protest anymore. She’d stayed home when her parents stood on street corners and held up signs, urging cars to toot their horns, and she wouldn’t let Sam go with them, either, even though he wanted to hold a sign, a candle, anything. “It’s complicated,” she’d said, and she had
thought about Jake, somewhere, risking his life for her, for Sam, for her parents, for freedom, for the world, for better or for worse.
Maybe everything worth thinking about was complicated.
Certainly, being a soldier didn’t make you cold or unfeeling. He was watching her face, waiting for her to acknowledge what he’d said.
It is hard. It was so, so hard. I missed you.
But she’d shut that weakness down in herself long ago. And how could she say that, that she’d missed him, when she’d never known him? When even now she didn’t, because, as he’d said, he didn’t know himself?
“I think it’s hard to be a parent, no matter what. It was lonely sometimes.” She tried a joke: “I could’ve used some company.”
Guilt chased regret across his face. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. You didn’t know.”
“The other kind of ‘I’m sorry.’ I wish you hadn’t had to do all that by yourself.”
She looked over at Sam, but he was dismantling his sandwich, oblivious to the fact that they were discussing him and his childhood. She wanted to ask Jake, Do you think you really would have done things differently if you’d known? But she couldn’t bring herself to do it with Sam in earshot.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer, either. What if he said no?
They drove down to the wharves and stood in line for Ferris wheel tickets, then waited their turn to go up. A fresh, salty breeze blew off Puget Sound. The sky was luminous, sparkles dancing over the surface of the water.
A ferry docked. Passengers flowed out along the walkway and into the pedestrian overpass; cars and bikes and motorcycles rolled out from the ferry’s cavernous belly.
She was hyperaware of Jake, of the disruption he caused as they moved through the crowd. People stared at his leg, murmured to their friends and family. They tried to be subtle about it, but they didn’t do a very good job. But Jake seemed not to notice. He stood beside her, big enough to loom. To make her feel petite, and she was not a teeny person. He was close enough for her to feel that ever-present hum that came off him, the sensation of her pheromones bouncing off his in the gap, as if they were two synapses about to spark.
Not supposed to notsupposedtonotsupposedto—
She wanted to throw it all skyward and reach for him. Right now. To turn her face into his chest, to grasp his T-shirt in her fists, to breathe the scent of him deep into her lungs, to rub herself all over him and go weak against him for the sheer mindless pleasure of having him hold her.
“Tomorrow I want to go to Bainbridge Island,” Sam said, startling her out of her self-destructive reverie.
Mira had read aloud to him from the Seattle Times last week about Bainbridge. There was a world-class playground, designed by the island’s own children. There was an ice-cream shop that specialized in blackberry and lavender and other local flavors. Right now, you could comb the island for a collection of child-sized glossy frogs painted by local artists, a scavenger hunt of sorts.
She knew exactly what was coming.
“Jake, do you want to—”
“Sam,” she said sharply, and he looked up at her, wounded.
“Excuse us a moment,” she said to Jake. She took Sam aside. “There’s a rule I never told you about invitations,” she said. “So it’s not your fault you didn’t know, but I’m going to tell you, so now you’ll know. The rule is, you can’t invite people to things unless you ask me first in private.”
“Mom? Can I invite Jake to come with us to Bainbridge Island tomorrow?”
She almost laughed, because Sam’s cravings were as unrestrained, as transparent and vivid, as hers. Instead she kissed him in the middle of his forehead, a tenderness he probably wouldn’t allow for much longer. “Sam, we’ve just gotten to know Jake. When you’ve just gotten to know someone, you can’t see them all the time, every day.” You can’t lose your sanity, you can’t lose your sense of direction.
“How long till we can see him all the time, every day?”
He was like some kind of sea creature that hadn’t grown a shell yet, so soft and squishy and vulnerable. And she desperately wanted him to stay this way forever, but she knew that he needed to grow up or he’d get stepped on. “We have to wait and see.”
The thing was, it didn’t matter how careful you were sometimes, because while you were busy being careful, things happened, and got out of your control. Like the way that Sam was already all set to get his heart broken.
Like the way she couldn’t control the way she felt, or what she wanted so much it turned her nerve endings to sparklers.
“Grown-ups have so many rules,” Sam said. “I don’t want to grow up, because then I have to have all those rules.”
“I hear you, Sammy.” She put her hands under his armpits and counted off a silent three by wiggling him slightly. On three, he jumped into her arms, the same as he had as a two-year-old. She rarely did this anymore, because he was getting so big, but right now she needed one of his hugs where he wrapped his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck and held on like she was going to save him from drowning.
When he began to squirm in her arms, she set him down, and they walked back.
For a moment, she couldn’t locate Jake in line, and she panicked.
Then she spotted him, nearly at the front of the line. He was turned so she could see his profile, and with the light behind him, it was almost a silhouette. Strong, clean, sharp. As she got closer, her heart beat faster instead of slowing down. At how physically glorious he was, how broad across the shoulders and chest, how much space he took up in line. At the guarded expression on his face, and then, when he spotted them, at the sudden warmth that broke it down.
At the surge of relief and desire her own body answered with.
It had been only a few seconds that she’d sought him with her gaze and failed to find him, but in those few seconds, she saw so much truth about this situation. She didn’t trust that he was here, not in a way that mattered. Not in a way that fit how much she already liked him, how much Sam already counted on him.
What if he disappeared? What if he freaked out and couldn’t deal with them, with this mysterious thing that seemed to be happening too fast for anyone to process? What if she came back today, tomorrow, next week, next month, to find him gone? Because after all, that was what had happened before.
“Hey,” he said. “We’re next.”
The operator corralled them into the glass pod, along with a crowd of people behind them. Their car was full, so she sat with Sam on one side of her, his nose pressed against the glass, and Jake on the other. They rose off the ground and the world fell away beneath them, vast and blue, the city tilting vertiginously away.
“Oh, man!” Sam said, over and over again, while an older couple beamed at him.
Jake was still beside her, the length of his thigh hard against hers. It had turned her to liquid, made her soft and stupid. The air between them, the molecules that moved in the boundary between her skin and the rest of the world, were charged up like a science experiment, so that she was almost afraid to move. To lift her eyes.
He moved his shoulder incrementally closer to hers, and a wave of heat broke over her. His shoulder. She didn’t even know if the movement had been deliberate.
Fool.
The wharves stretched out below like tick marks, their details fading and then coming back into view.
“That’s Bainbridge,” Sam said, pointing. “That’s where Mom and I are going tomorrow. It’s going to be super fun. I bet people who don’t go with us will be sad they didn’t.”
She smiled behind her hand. You could teach a seven-year-old manners, but he would always wriggle his way out from under them to pursue his own agenda.
As the pod was touching back to earth on its final round, Jake leaned close, so Sam couldn’t hear, and murmured, “Let me take you guys to dinner.”
Say no thank you.
“Yay, Mom!” Sam had heard
anyway. When it concerned him, he found a way.
Say no thank you. Say you need to get Sam home and washed up and in his PJs or he’ll fall asleep in the car on the way home and—
“Mom, please, can we?”
Tell him that’s sweet of him but tomorrow’s a school day and it would be irresponsible of you.
She didn’t want the day to end. She didn’t want him to walk away, didn’t want to feel their chemistry stretch and break like a child’s bubble as he stepped out of the force field. She didn’t want to admire his retreating back, gauge the width of his shoulders, or distantly note the aesthetics of his butt as he retreated.
She wanted him beside her, with them, for as long as she could finagle it, and she wanted a chance to measure his shoulders and drag him against her with her own itchy palms.
They were both watching her, waiting for her answer, two pairs of identical eyes.
She answered Sam, “Sure,” but she was talking to Jake, and she didn’t know whether to hope, or not, that she wasn’t agreeing to just dinner.
Chapter 12
“Sam’s asleep,” Jake said. Sam’s head was canted at an awkward angle, his mouth open, his face slack.
She peeked in the rearview mirror. “That was fast. We wore him out.”
Jake was worn out, too, from craving. From watching her smile at Sam, at the waiter, at random people passing their table, then look at him and turn serious. Dark brown eyes on him like a touch. Like she was drinking him in, memorizing him.
She had high, strong cheekbones, pink from too much sun today. Just about the fairest skin you could have. A pixie face, a pointy chin, a slightly upturned nose.
All those things were like unconnected pieces of information his brain took in, but it was her smile that put them together. Made her beautiful. Made it impossible for him to stop staring, except when she looked back and he couldn’t hold the intensity of her gaze.
This was, in a word, impossible. He couldn’t be around her and not want her, couldn’t be in their lives, near her, and not have her.
She’d asked him, point blank, at the playground to help her keep this simple. For Sam. But he understood better than anyone that the kinds of emotions that Mira brought to the surface would not let him be sane or rational, not let him anywhere near simple.
