A CLASS ACT

by Pamela Burford

  "Dena." Gabe retraced his steps, until he was standing right in front of her. "I got that call at 4:00 a.m. An important case was threatening to blow up in our face—witnesses balking, new evidence turning up… We had to bolt out of the house right then. Should I have started pounding on your bedroom door at four in the morning?"

  She had the grace to look sheepish. "Only if you wanted to see how mad I could really get."

  "I figured when you didn't see me at breakfast you'd find my note and still have time to discover a miracle allergy cure and go on that garden thing."

  "I didn't come downstairs till after everyone had left," she said.

  "Except Scott." Leave it alone, he told himself. The last image he wanted to project was that of jealous swain. Lord knew she had a right to watch those damn whales with whomever she chose.

  He offered his arm. She hesitated only slightly before sliding her hand through his elbow, her fingers cool and silky on his skin.

  "So," he said, as he ushered her up the steps. "Tell me more about these minkes."

  * * *

  9

  « ^ »

  Dena followed the sounds of activity to the kitchen. The others were all there, busily preparing the picnic dinner they'd enjoy while listening to the Long Island Philharmonic play classical music under the stars at one of the state parks.

  Rhonda was the first to spot the elastic bandage binding Dena's knee. Her hands stilled on the turkey breast she was slicing. "What happened to you?"

  "Took a spill off my bike." All eyes on her, Dena limped into the room and slowly eased herself onto a maple chair between Reba and Ham, who were slicing loaves of homemade pumpernickel and whole-grain bread. Frank occupied another chair and was in the process of cutting a wedge of Cheddar cheese into chunks. Most of it ended up in his mouth.

  That morning a dozen of the hardiest reunion-goers had rented bikes and taken the ferry to Shelter Island, located between the north and south forks of Long Island. There they'd biked the twenty-five-mile butterfly-shaped trail.

  Dena and Gabe had paired up and ridden together, which had seemed natural after the night before. Their little tête-à-tête in front of the Harvard Club had been a turning point of sorts. The dinner that followed had been relaxed and fun, with none of the awkwardness that had plagued them since last Saturday. Almost like old times.

  Dena had yet to decide how she felt about that. For that matter, she had yet to decide how she felt about her little subterfuge tonight, but with only one day left before she and Gabe went their separate ways…

  "When did you fall?" Scott asked. "I didn't notice."

  "I was behind you. It happened when I took that last turn."

  "When?" Gabe paused in the act of squeezing lemons into a gallon jug of iced tea. "I was with you the whole time. I never saw you fall."

  "Sure you did," Dena said. "I'm not surprised you forgot. It didn't seem like anything at the time, but later my knee started acting up."

  "That can happen," Reba said, "delayed reactions like that. You ought to have it looked at. You might have torn something."

  "That's what I was thinking," Dena said, rubbing her bandaged knee.

  Frowning, Gabe screwed the top onto the tea jar. "I know I never saw you fall."

  "It was quick. Remember? Neither one of us thought anything of it at the time." Dena drilled him with a pointed look. "Remember?"

  He blinked. "Oh, that. Yes, I remember now. You fell. When you took that last turn."

  Took you long enough to "remember," Dena thought.

  "That's why I didn't go," Andrea said, from the center island where her delicate little hands were busy wrapping sandwiches in wax paper. "I have too many responsibilities to risk an injury like that."

  Oh, is that why you didn't go? Dena was tempted to ask. I thought it was because you have no stamina or muscle tone. The natural result of dieting down to a size two and engaging in no physical activity aside from carrying on with other people's boyfriends.

  "I hate to cop out on you guys again," Dena said, still rubbing the knee, "but I'm afraid to try to drive like this—not to mention all the walking once we get to the park. And anyway, I really think I'd better get it checked right away," she added, looking meaningfully at Gabe.

  Ham, sitting next to her, glanced at her knee, then at her face. Just long enough for her to intercept what could only be called a directorial look. She was familiar with that look but hadn't seen it since high school when Ham had been her drama coach, directing the school production of Sabrina. Dena had had the title role, and Gabe had played her love interest—and that was the look Ham used to give them when he wanted more pathos, more fervor, more feeling.

  Ham was a devotee of Method acting, a technique that requires the actor to internalize the character's personality, to think and feel like the character. At one point when they were rehearsing Sabrina, Ham had been unsatisfied with the level of passion Gabe exhibited when he and Sabrina had their Big Kiss. Ham had pulled Gabe off to the side and, for his ears only, had described in graphic detail precisely what he should be thinking about while kissing Sabrina. As he'd listened, Gabe's ears had turned redder and redder. Afterward he'd adamantly refused to tell anyone what Ham had said.

  All Dena knew was that from then on, she'd always been eager to rehearse that particular scene.

  She didn't know what had prompted Ham to give her that look now, but it had the same effect that it had had back then. Drawing on her recollections of physical pain, she tensed her facial muscles and subtly shifted in her chair as if to find a more comfortable position.

  It had to be her imagination, but she could swear Ham bestowed his unspoken approval. Which was impossible. He couldn't know it was a performance.

  Could he?

  "You don't have to go to the emergency room," Reba said. "There's one of those walk-in places five minutes away. They can X-ray it there and everything."

  "But how will she get there," Ham asked, "since Gabe and I have to drive everyone else to the park?" His gaze flicked to Gabe, now absorbed in packing the wicker picnic hamper with food.

  Dena waited a few seconds, then said, "Oh, don't be silly. I'll take a cab."

  "Gosh, I wish you didn't have to do that," Ham said. And more loudly, "There must be some other way."

  Gabe's hands stilled and his head snapped up. Finally catching on. His cluelessness was as sweet as it was exasperating. "I'll take her," he said.

  Andrea looked up from her meticulous sandwich wrapping. Her expression was unreadable, but Dena had the distinct impression Gabe wasn't the only one finally catching on.

  "You can't!" Rhonda protested. "How will the rest of us get to the park?"

  "We can call Gil again," Ham suggested. "He won't mind."

  "Why don't you just borrow my Navigator?" Dena said, producing the keys from the pocket of her boxer-style black-and-white-checked shorts.

  Frank made a grab for the keys, but Scott was too fast for him. "I'll put some gas in it," Scott said as he pocketed the keys. "You're running low."

  "Well." Rhonda appeared vastly relieved. "That's settled, then."

  * * *

  "We're going to hell. You know that, don't you?" Dena said as she helped herself to a second slice of pizza. "Yesterday's fibs, and now this."

  "A couple of innocent white lies," Gabe said, mouth full. "For a good cause—making up for our missed beach date."

  "You're a lawyer. I'm not used to lying."

  He affected a wounded look, and warned, "I can still catch the end of the concert, if I hurry."

  They were in the family room, a sprawling yet homey space with a whitewashed brick fireplace and an eclectic assortment of furniture arranged in cozy groupings. Gabe and Dena sat cross-legged on tasseled floor pillows on opposite sides of a glass-topped antique steamer trunk that served as a coffee table. The open pizza box was on the floor nearby.

  The stereo played Steely Dan's mellow jazz/rock. In a nearby corner were clustered a half doze
n fat, vanilla-scented candles in iron floor stands of varying heights. The warm glow they cast was augmented only by one small table lamp.

  As soon as the others had left, Dena and Gabe had run out to the video store and discovered that the movie that had once been their mutual favorite still was. They'd munched microwave popcorn while watching Some Like It Hot, but that had only sharpened their appetite. After the movie they'd ordered a pizza with their trademark anchovies and fried eggplant.

  "I haven't done this much lying since we used to tell my folks we were going to the library to study," Dena said. A blob of melted cheese dropped off her pizza, narrowly missing her pimento-colored silk T-shirt.

  "Do you think they ever suspected we were really making out at the duck pond?" Gabe took a pull from his bottle of beer.

  "I didn't think so at the time, but a few years later I got up the nerve to ask my mom."

  His eyes widened. "What did she say?"

  Dena grinned. "She said that back then she figured whatever I was doing that left me with my hair tangled and my cheeks pink, at least I was doing it with you and not some irresponsible boy who didn't respect me. Oh, and she said once I came back from the library with my shirt inside out."

  "Oh God," he groaned, and they both laughed.

  "I wonder if I'd be capable of that kind of restraint as a parent," Dena said, as she picked at the label of her beer bottle. "Knowing some sort of hanky-panky was going on, but trusting in my daughter's judgment and maturity."

  "Your mother's trust was well founded. I still don't know how you kept my adolescent urges reined in for so long."

  Gabe looked instantly uncomfortable, as if he'd spoken without thinking. Perhaps he was afraid of jeopardizing their fragile detente by reminding Dena that when he'd finally given in to those adolescent urges, she'd been nowhere in sight.

  He needn't have worried. Somehow, for Dena, thinking about what had broken them up no longer hurt as much as it once had. For the past fifteen years, whenever she'd thought about the incident, she'd imagined Gabe as he'd been then, or as her selective memory portrayed him. The Gabe who sat in front of her now was a complex man who had little in common with the boy she'd once known.

  Dena gave him a lopsided smile. "You seem to assume you were the only one struggling with those adolescent urges. I had to rein in the both of us."

  "Those were incredible, our dates in the back seat of that Camaro. Heaven and hell at once. I used to go home in such pain."

  "Everything's so new when you're that age," she said. "So exciting."

  Gabe looked pained. "I wish—"

  Dena shushed him with a finger to his lips. "Those are the good memories," she said gently. "They're still good memories. They always have been."

  He captured her hand and pressed a kiss to her palm, never taking his eyes from hers, his gaze so raw, so heartbreakingly open, it robbed her of speech. He lowered their linked hands to the table.

  "I think about what might have been," he said, his voice choked with emotion. "The plans we had…"

  She squeezed his hand. "I wonder, sometimes, if we really could've made it work. We were so young."

  "But so much in love." His thumb rubbed her knuckles.

  "Sometimes love alone isn't enough."

  "We sure thought it was, back then." He studied her face. "Why did you do this, Dena? Fake the injury and connive to spend the evening with me?"

  What could she say? She didn't know herself. She only knew that they had one day left, that she couldn't go back home with this maelstrom of conflicting emotions swirling inside.

  You don't get anywhere without taking risks. Devlin's Second Rule of Business.

  Dena rose. Gabe's eyes tracked her progress around the coffee table. She sat next to him, and he scooted over to make room for her on the large floor pillow.

  Her heart sprinted. Her breath came fast and shallow. She stared into his whiskey-colored eyes, searching for … what? Some assurance that she was doing the right thing? That she wouldn't curse herself, and him, tomorrow? That she wouldn't regret the reckless impulse that even now made her lean toward him and touch her lips to his?

  The connection was nearly electric; an energy seemed to flow between them. This kiss was different from the one they'd shared three days ago in the workshop; different, too, from those they'd stolen in the back seat of Gabe's Camaro so long ago. They both knew where this kiss would take them.

  That knowledge both thrilled and terrified Dena. This man had broken her heart once. If she let it happen again, she had no one to blame but herself.

  "It's all right," he murmured against her mouth, as if reading her mind. "It's all right, love…"

  Dena lifted her hand and caressed Gabe's face, his evening beard shadow like sandpaper under her fingers. He angled his head and deepened the kiss, and eagerly she followed his lead, tasting and touching, filling her senses with him.

  She felt her shirt being pulled out of the waistband of her shorts, felt Gabe's big, hot hand stroke up her back. A sigh escaped her. His touch became bolder, sliding around to her breasts, lingering on the sensitive tips straining against her bra. She groaned into his mouth.

  "Dena, how I've missed you," Gabe murmured, pressing hard, hungry kisses to her face and throat. He yanked her shirt up and over her head, tossing it aside.

  Then he just stared. Dena's bra was flesh-toned lace, accented with contrasting strips of black along the underwire and across the cup seams. The shoulder straps were thin double cords of black satin. The dramatic touches of black emphasized the bra's structure and thus the bounty that filled it to capacity.

  Gabe shook his head in wonder. "You never owned anything like this in high school." His thumbs circled Dena's nipples, clearly visible beneath the sheer lace, coaxing them to stiff peaks. "You're so beautiful," he breathed, almost reverently, as his greedy eyes devoured her form before returning to her face. "Even more beautiful than I remembered."

  He kissed her again, with searing possessiveness, crushing her to him. Dena felt as if she were floating free of herself, melding with him. He unhooked the bra and drew it away, even as he lowered her to the floor, her back supported by the big pillow. She pulled him down on top of her, delighting in the weight of him, in the way their bodies seemed to fit together like two halves of a matched set.

  Gabe kissed a tingling trail down to her breasts. Dena cried out under the bold stroke of his tongue, the hot suction of his mouth. Her fingers pushed through his light brown hair, slid down his thick, corded neck. Her long fingernails dug into his shoulders, but he didn't seem to notice.

  Panting, she groaned his name, clung to him tighter. She found herself moving restlessly against him. Without relinquishing her breasts, he slid one hand downward, over her shorts, to caress her intimately.

  Dena gasped, arching into his touch, a hairbreadth from release.

  In the next instant they lurched apart as voices came from the front of the house, followed by the sound of a door slamming.

  Swearing under his breath, Gabe hurled himself at Dena's T-shirt and tossed it to her.

  "My bra!" she said, frantically searching for it.

  He glanced around. "Do without it."

  "Me?"

  A grin split his face. "Maybe not."

  The voices and footfalls were louder. Rhonda called, "Dena? Gabe?"

  "Got it!" She snatched the bra from under the coffee table, presenting her back as she shoved her arms through the straps. "Hook it up. Hurry!"

  "…acoustically speaking," she heard Andrea say. "But what can one expect from an open-air performance?"

  "If sound quality is all you care about, stick to Carnegie Hall." Scott's voice. "There's a lot more to music in the park than music."

  "You don't think they could still be at the doctor?" Rhonda asked.

  Dena pulled her shirt over her head just as Frank said, "Nah, his car's here."

  The double louvered doors swung open and Andrea, Scott, Rhonda and Frank entered the family
room.

  "There you are!" Rhonda said. "How's the knee?"

  "Well, they X-rayed it," Gabe said, leaning negligently on one palm as he lifted a slice of pizza.

  His nonchalant performance amazed Dena, who fought to school her expression as her heart stuttered like a Tommy gun. It had to be all those years as a courtroom lawyer, she realized. This was a man who'd never tip his hand by losing his cool.

  "No serious damage," Gabe added, "just a mild muscle pull."

  "Well, thank God for that," Rhonda said, though she looked at Dena a little oddly, for some reason.

  Frank, however, only had eyes for the half-full pizza box. "You gonna eat that?" Peering at it more closely, he grimaced. "What the hell did they put on it?"

  Scott picked up the videotape box. "Some Like It Hot. Good choice. Marilyn Monroe—my kinda woman." He looked at Dena appraisingly. "I always figured you and she must've been separated at birth."

  Dena laughed. "Which would only make me about seventy-three now."

  "You must be feeling better," Andrea said. "No more bandage. No swelling or discoloration that I can see. And your sense of humor is intact, so one can assume you're not in pain." Her silver-eyed gaze remained as cool and unruffled as a frozen lake.

  Another master of courtroom sangfroid. Dena squirmed under Andrea's blatant scrutiny, wishing they'd all just leave.

  As if on cue, Scott said, "Let's let these two polish off their dinner in peace. Did I see one last slice of Reba's peach cobbler in the fridge?"

  This last comment motivated Frank to hurriedly withdraw, which Dena suspected was Scott's objective. Rhonda said, "Well, I'm pooped. At home my little one gets me up at five-thirty. You'd think I'd enjoy sleeping late this week, but wouldn't you know, I'm up with the sun every morning. Good night, all."

  As Rhonda left, they heard Ham and Reba enter the house. Scott said to Andrea, "You still up for that poker game we promised Ham?"

  "In a minute. I've got to check my voice mail, make sure everything's under control at work."

  Andrea turned to Gabe. "Unless you've already done that?"

  Gabe waved off her concern. "They have the number here. I'm not worried."