Gage was about to spout off the first thing that came to mind, which he knew would make Cybil Cole look as though she were trying to ignore the source of an unpleasant odor. Then he noticed Molly’s crestfallen face and remembered what Sebastian had told him about the likelihood of them being able to have children, and entirely different words came to mind.
“Companionship,” Sebastian told his mother quietly. He put down the butter knife, took Molly’s hand and dusted the bridge of her knuckles with his lips. “That’s the point. I’m one of very few men lucky enough to marry his best friend. If Molly and I ever do have a child together — and both of us know that’s a very big ‘if’ — that’s just gravy.”
Molly’s mouth trembled into a smile, and she gazed at her husband with dewy-eyed adoration. Gage made a decision at that very moment. This is what I want. This, exactly. A woman who looked at him as though he didn’t hang just the moon but the entire galaxy.
Someone who loved him without even the smallest of doubts.
Shuck harrumphed. “Tell that to Nola March,” he said, reaching for as third serving of dressing. This time Cybil didn’t bother to stop him. “If Nola had given Les more babies — that son he always wanted — he might not have gotten that itch in his britches. Not much else to say about that.”
“Which is already way too much, Dad,” Sebastian’s voice sounded ominous.
Gage cleared his throat and jumped in. “Speaking as the kid of parents who were always on the skids, sometimes it pays to quit while you’re still ahead, Mr. C.”
“Are we talking about Sabrina March?” Cybil asked with pointed idleness. “I fear that apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree,” she sighed. “The question is, which one?”
Gage looked at Molly curiously, but her gaze was focused on a point somewhere on the wall above her father-in-law’s head. Her mouth was once again stretched into an unhappy line.
“That wasn’t a very … nice thing to say about Sabrina,” she eventually said in a quiet voice. “She’s my best friend, not a piece of fruit.”
Gage watched as Cybil muted her glare and continued to stab away at her salad. Shuck’s face went red with mortification. He looked away from his wife and stroked his jaw. Sebastian remained poised over his plate motionlessly, knife and fork in hand.
“I’ll fetch the pies,” Molly rose to her feet automatically and began to collect empty plates from the table. “I’ve made mincemeat, bourbon-pecan, pumpkin—”
“—No need to, darling,” Sebastian interrupted her tenderly. His utensils landed on his plate with a loud clank. “We’ve obviously expended all outlets of civil conversation if we’re resorting to gossip and innuendo about one of our friends. I do believe that our holiday festivities have concluded for the day.”
Molly paused with one hand on her hip and pinched her fingers at her brow as though she were in pain. “I have to agree with Sebastian,” she said in a pleasant but unsteady voice. “I’ll get to-go containers for you, Cybil. Shuck, I’ll stick in an extra slice of mincemeat. I know it’s your favorite.”
Cybil said nothing but managed to summon up a look of indifference. She blotted her lips with a napkin primly and balled it up on her plate.
“What the hell?” Shuck looked incredulous. “You mean we aren’t even going to watch the big game?”
After the Coles were ushered out with dessert plates wrapped in cellophane, Gage and Sebastian sat on the front porch armed with two slabs of Molly’s pecan pie and a six-pack of beer. Molly insisted on staying inside under the guise of doing the washing up, but Gage had heard the sound of the bedroom door closing as he walked outside.
“I clocked it at just under an hour,” he told Sebastian. “That’s pretty damn good for a holiday with Cybil and Shuck. Damn good pie, too. Your wife bakes like an angel.” Gage licked his fork. The nutty, buttery-tasting filling tasted even richer when preceded by a gulp of light bock, he noticed.
“That’s an hour of our lives we’ll never get back,” Sebastian said. “Molly and I will never end up like my parents — will we?”
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” Gage told him. “The two of you look good from where I’m sitting.”
“Did you know that my mom makes my dad move to one of the guest rooms whenever he starts snoring in the middle of the night?” Sebastian asked. “Family. You’re lucky you don’t have to navigate those waters, bro.”
“Indeed I do not,” Gage said.
A cool breeze rustled through the trees, kicking up the nutty smell of turning leaves and stirring up memories of Grandpa Fitzgerald smoking his pipe and spinning another yarn. The accompanying realization was sobering. Gage didn’t know how to explain to his best friend that every holiday felt like a blank schedule just waiting to be filled with last-minute invitations from married friends and coworkers.
“That came out wrong, didn’t it?” Sebastian asked, looking apologetic. “Molly and I are your family.”
“I appreciate that, man,” Gage said sincerely.
“And there’s Sabrina, of course.” Sebastian took a swallow of beer while he mulled over the idea. “She sort of comes part and parcel, if that wasn’t obvious from your dinner table exchange with my well-intentioned but oft-short-sighted wife.”
“You were right,” Gage smiled and shook his head. “Molly does have strange ideas.”
“Really strange,” Sebastian agreed.
“The thought of me and Sabrina ending up together is—”
“—as impossible as staging an Ibsen play.”
“I was going to say ‘way out in left field’.”
“Indeed. That, too.”
“Have you told Molly to give up the dream?” Gage looked at his best friend.
“No,” Sebastian replied. “I just can’t bust her chops like that.”
It was best to let things play out as they would, Gage decided. Molly would eventually come to see that trying to pair him up with her best friend was a misbegotten notion from the get-go. As far as his own feelings on the matter were concerned, it was best to stick with the facts. Sabrina was a heart-and-soul kisser, and had their circumstances been quite different, he wouldn’t mind the feeling of her lips on his again. She smelled like lilies and incense — or sometimes baking apples and almonds — her husky voice was made for whispering sweet somethings, and her runner’s legs looked mighty fine under those tiny gym shorts.
But she vexed the hell out of him, and Gage wasn’t in the mood for a good mystery unless it was between the covers of a book. He recalled the guarded look in her eyes and the way she’d stammered in distress when he’d unclogged the damn sink earlier that day.
Almost as though she were fiercely guarding her piece of turf.
There was one other thing Gage instinctively knew, and that was that Cybil was dead wrong about his housemate. Sabrina hadn’t fallen from anyone else’s tree.
Oh, no.
That particular apple was still on the top bough, well out of reach.
And that tree needed a little shaking.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It wasn’t the first Thanksgiving Sabrina had spent at the office. And she doubted it would be the last. Holidays were only numbers on the monthly calendar — workdays with the small benefits of sparse downtown traffic and a lax dress code.
After her workout, she had thrown on her most comfortable exercise pants and a fleece top and had shoved her feet into her old clogs. Thanksgiving deserved a nod to tradition, so she nipped by Threadgill’s Southern Cooking, one of the few full-service restaurants open for business on holidays.
Armed with a takeout turkey dinner, pie and caffeine, she settled in behind her desk, turned on a small lamp and started her work. Several hours later, her stomach began to squeal. The time on the computer monitor told her that it was already four o’clock. She peered inside the Styrofoam Threadgill’s container. The green salad and cranberry sauce resided in compartments adjacent to the turkey and dressing entree, so she c
ouldn’t reheat it in the microwave without something wilting. She cut into the cold bird using the flimsy biodegradable utensils and chewed unenthusiastically. The office was so quiet that the only thing she could hear was the sound of her own breathing. Maybe music would make her feel more productive. She turned on the radio. Gage’s voice boomed through the air.
“—and so, my dudes, Gideon and I decided to do this turkey day special just for you single men out there who had to play third wheel at your married friends’ houses this year. It’s lame.”
“Totally lame,” Giggles concurred.
Great, Sabrina thought miserably, stabbing a congealed sweet potato with a fork.
“Yeah, man. When you get together with a bunch of single guys and their ladies du jour, different story,” Gage went on pragmatically, “’Cause you know damn straight that most of them will call it splitsville by New Year’s Eve. But then you have your married friends—”
“Aw, man! Married!” Giggles crowed.
“—and you feel like a total schmuck because you’re the one who showed up with the twelve-pack of Shiner Bock and everybody else brought something that fits in a casserole dish. That’s when you start feeling like you got the cosmic boot.”
“Dude!”
“Yeah. Like fu — ’scuse me, gentle listeners — like effin’ Pluto, man,” Gage grumbled. “Can any of you dudes out there relate?”
Given the “gentle listeners” the show usually courted, it would be a long day for the technician on the end of the dump button, Sabrina thought. She was just about to change the station when the on-air banter changed tracks.
“So, man. I hear you moved into a new casa,” Giggles said.
“Yeah, I got a new abode — and a new housemate,” Gage said. “Can you believe it? I’m thirty-eight years old. I need to live alone. The economy has me by the short hairs.”
“So what’s he like, the housemate? Is he chill?”
“She, dude. She.”
“Dude, naw!” Giggles exclaimed in disbelief. “A chick? What’s she like? Is she hawt?”
“Oh. God. No, no, no…” Sabrina whispered in horror.
“She’s hot all right — a hot mess,” Gage replied. “Workaholic with a serious espresso addiction. Straggles in from work at night with her war paint down to her chin.”
“Sah-weet,” Giggles commented lasciviously.
“Think Edie Sedgwick after the Chelsea Hotel fire.”
“She don’t got a boyfriend or nothin’?”
“Those are double negatives, idiot,” Sabrina snapped at Giggles, who of course couldn’t hear her.
“Nah, man,” Gage went on. “She’s got a body that won’t quit. But anything under that tiny little equator of a waistline is Iditarod territory. Couldn’t cross that latitude with John Baker mushing.”
The fork in her hand snapped. A large dollop of cornbread dressing landed on her desk, taking the tines along with it.
“So I take it she’s ‘cool’ to hang with?” Giggles spoon-fed Fitz a cue for the next zinger.
“Oh, she’s cool, all right. Temps drop by twenty degrees when the CHB is in the house.”
“CHB?” Giggles and Sabrina echoed simultaneously.
“Yeah — cold, hard bi—” Gage stopped himself, and then the two men exploded into raucous laughter.
Sabrina blinked hard. Had she just inferred correctly? Was he about to call her a — a—?
“Jackass,” she muttered savagely. Rabid with anger, she grabbed the telephone receiver and stabbed in the number to KCAP with a pencil eraser. She paced around the Think Tank while the phone rang and rang.
“We have a call coming in from the House of Representatives,” Gage finally announced. “Don’t you just love caller I.D.?” he added conversationally. Then the next thing she knew, his voice was rumbling in her ear.
“Fitz residence. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” She could hear his voice coming out of the radio speakers after a slight delay.
“It’s the b–(BEEP).” Her voice sounded like she was gargling with acid.
“Wow. I do believe I’m in trouble.” Gage faked a chastised tone, which only galled Sabrina more.
“Rein in the commentary, Fitzgerald,” she ordered. “Or you can park your a-(BEEP) in the garage when I change the locks. Are we crystal?”
— we crystal? She heard her voice echo in the room.
“Did I lie, kids?” Gage addressed his radio audience blandly.
Giggles giggled. “She must be righteously pissed if she called you by your last name.”
“As for you, toadie,” she addressed Gage’s irritating sidekick. “Stop egging him on.” Then she slammed down the phone. A dumb silence coursed through both the airwaves and her office.
“I think she means that part about the garage,” Giggles finally said nervously.
Gage sighed. “What’d I tell you? Welcome to my life.”
The feigned persecution in his voice plucked at her nerves like a fingernail on a violin string. High E. Pizzicato. Sabrina punched the radio off, fuming. Damn the man. She realized that a big part of his job involved a talent for hyperbole, but today he’d gone too far. Now her concentration was scattered to the winds.
She grabbed her keys and purse. The slam of the office door sounded like a clap of lightning in the empty Annex halls. She pitched the Styrofoam container and coffee cups in a communal trash bin. So “Fitz” thought she was cold, hard bitch?
She’d fix that particular wagon.
Wheel by wheel.
**
“You need liquid reinforcement, man?” Gideon asked as the taxi idled in front of the house.
Gage’s coworker produced a silver flask from the inside pocket of his coat jacket. Gage took it, unscrewed the cap and took a long swig of the flask’s contents. Gin.
“Thanks.” He winced as the potent smell of juniper berries burned his nose.
Sleep-in mornings were few and far between, so he’d made the most of his evening out. After the Thanksgiving show ended, he and Gideon had headed out to the Gingerbread Man along with the other single guys at the station for drinks and a few laughs. Now Gage could see the television flickering blue through the living room window. That meant Sabrina was home and seething. He remembered the husky sizzle in her voice when she called up the station.
Maid March meant business.
“I think I better make it a double,” Gage muttered and took another hearty swallow from the flask.
“Here’s to difficult women.” Gideon gave him a sympathetic look.
“Yeah. Cheers,” Gage agreed.
“Got quite a few of those on the line myself.”
“Really?” Gage looked at the other man with unconcealed surprise. Whenever he overhead women swooning over their latest paramour, Gideon didn’t exactly come to mind. Gage’s coworker had a wiry frame that seemed to be made up of mostly knees and elbows. Twin puffs of curly dark hair sprang from either side of his pate.
“Star appeal is sex appeal, dude,” Gideon explained with a salacious grin. “Lotsa chicks are Fitz girls. But some of them want their Giggles. Use it or lose it. Am I right?”
“Right like rain,” Gage agreed. He screwed the cap on the flask and handed it back to Gideon reluctantly.
“Give me a call mañana, dude. That is, if you’re still standing,” Gideon added with a cackle.
Gage collected his belongings from the back of the cab and watched it drive off into the night. His workmates got to go home to bachelor pads and warehouse apartments shared with understanding girlfriends, the lucky bastards. Who knew what trouble was brewing on the other side of the door in front of him?
He walked through the doorway and came to a sudden halt, squinting at the unlikely vision in front of him. Sabrina sat cross-legged in front of the television set wearing a slinky black robe knotted at the waist. She wore full war paint. Her eyes were lined with kohl, the lids smudged with sultry shades of charcoal and gray. Gage supposed this was what
those silly glamour magazines described as a “smoky eye” look. Her lips were glossed into a cherry red fuck-off pout, and she’d moussed her hair into a strategically mussy, model-on-the-catwalk look.
Damn, she cleaned up really nice.
If nice is what he could call it.
“She lies in wait,” Gage observed softly. “And here I am with a peace offering.”
He intrepidly crossed the living room and placed the paper honeycomb turkey he’d purloined from the KCAP break room on the coffee table. Sabrina gave it a cursory glance, then turned her attention back to her documentary.
“This is just a wild guess, but you’re pissed off about this afternoon’s impromptu show,” he went on. “The World at War cannot be a good sign. Or is this mandatory viewing for top-ranking legislative staff prior to entering the hot zone?”
He knew it was far from over when Sabrina hit the mute button on the remote and gave him a sultry smoky-eyed glare. She didn’t speak a word. Instead, she rose to her feet lightly. The short black robe revealed a tempting expanse of her well-defined runner’s thighs. He watched as she slowly and deliberately unknotted the tie and tilted her head back in an acquiescent lingerie model pose. Certain things were beyond his control, and Gage felt a familiar bulge rising in his jeans.
She knew what she was doing, right down to the letter.
The question was … why?
“This is getting a scary,” he said, disconcerted. “Look, if you’re going to bust my chops for the ‘cold, hard bitch’ comment, bust away. I probably deserve it. But I’d prefer you do it when I still have a buzz on. It’s less painful and far less memorable.”
Sabrina still said nothing. She slunk forward slowly, letting the robe fall open to reveal a black net-trimmed bra and matching underwear. The gently rounded curves of her breasts and the nipped-in waist he’d imagined beneath the horrible bridesmaid’s dress were right there in front of him on display. He had an unexplainable urge to trace the flat, dark moles that peppered the smooth skin of her belly with his fingertips. As though reading his mind, a small gasp hitched in Sabrina’s throat as she looked at his hands hungrily.
Something About You (Just Me & You) Page 18
