The Heart of the Matter

by Muriel Jensen

  She pushed out of his arms, stared at him for a moment as though she resented him for something, then ran through the shadows to the light from the French doors and disappeared inside the hotel dining room. Jason thought that don’t, can’t, and hell were three words a man usually didn’t want to hear when he was kissing a woman. And she’d pelted him with all three. That didn’t bode well for what he was beginning to feel for Laura Price.

  He found her in the parking lot, leaning against the front fender of his Mercedes, a hand to her diaphragm as she dragged in air.

  “You know,” he said, leaning beside her against the car, “maybe we should talk about your being faithful. You just ran away from me.”

  She gave him an apologetic side glance. “You scared me.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been celibate a long time.”

  She gave his shoulder a healthy smack. “That’s not what I mean. I mean…we’re not going to be dealing with fluffy kid stuff here.”

  He shrugged a shoulder, then dramatically rubbed where she’d punched him. “You may be deliciously taut and firm in a leotard, but I’m not a kid. Is that what you want? Kid stuff?”

  “Of course not.” She sighed. “Maybe I’ve just never felt the power of…something that wasn’t. It’s a little daunting.”

  “It’s very daunting. That’s why it took me this long to decide that I could do it again.” He straightened away from the car. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

  And that was how he left it—no promise to call, no suggestion that she call him if and when she was ready.

  She gave him a chaste kiss good-night in the condo’s hallway, apparently appreciating his silence, then ran up the steps and disappeared.

  He drove home curiously numb, thinking how strange his life had become. The first time he’d fallen in love, they’d both been attracted, and—he saw now—they’d both been fearless. Love had grown, thrived, borne fruit, always looked ahead.

  It was going to be harder this time. Age and experience brought caution. If there was only himself at risk, he might push this to see what happened. To show her that major league love had it all over the kid stuff-warts and all.

  He pulled into the garage and crept quietly into the kitchen-not at all surprised to find Adam sitting up, watching Leno, a turkey sandwich in hand.

  “How’d it go?” he asked, turning off the television and following him into the kitchen. “I made the coffee.”

  Jason hooked an arm around the boy’s neck and held him there while he poured a cup. It smelled brisk and strong, and somehow the homeyness of coffee warming and his firstborn beside him stabilized his emotions.

  “It went well,” he said. He traded Adam the cup for a bite of the sandwich. “We ate, I gave a brilliant speech, then we danced.”

  Adam sipped at the cup, then handed it back when Jason returned his sandwich. “And that went well?” he asked in surprise.

  Jason frowned at him. “Have faith in your old man, Adam. I was quite the charmer in my day.”

  “Yeah, but do we want to think about how long ago that was? Did you.you know.kiss her?”

  Jason walked him to his room. “We’ve talked about this. Gentlemen don’t.”

  “I know, guys don’t talk about their exploits. But you’re my dad. I’m your live-in son. I have a comfortable future at risk here if you get married again.”

  Jason laughed, lowering his voice as they passed Eric’s and Matt’s rooms. “This was only a first date, Adam. But, yes, I kissed her.”

  Adam stopped at the doorway to his room, clearly astonished. “And?”

  “And it was very nice.”

  “Did she think so?”

  Jason was convinced she had and that that was most of her problem. “Yes, I’m pretty sure she did.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. Get to bed, it’s late. And thanks for making the coffee.”

  “Sure. Oh, Dad?” Adam caught his arm. “Aunt Patsy called, and she and Nickie are going to Boston to find Nickie an apartment before she goes back to college. She wants to know if they can visit for a few days since we didn’t get to Lawrence for the Fourth of July. She said she’ll call you on her cell phone in the morning on the way.”

  “Okay.” Jason pulled Adam into his arm and hugged him. “Sleep tight.”

  Adam opened his door, then stopped and pointed to Matt’s room. “Dufus really did. Went right to sleep on his Power Rangers sheets. I had to check for monsters, but once I told him the room was clear, I didn’t hear one whine out of him.”

  Jason nodded. That had been a clever gift on Laura’s part. It occurred to him that it was easy to identify the fears in someone else and miss your own entirely.

  He wandered back toward the kitchen, thinking it was probably going to be a sleepless night and he’d be able to get a column or two ahead.

  5

  Women should come into a man’s life with instructions designed for those accustomed to visual aids and replays. And with an interpreter, as well, because even if a woman states her case twice, it doesn’t mean you’ll understand it.

  —“Warfield’s Battles”

  “So…we’ve been…walking for…for almost an hour.” Dixie swallowed and gulped in air. “And you haven’t…told me…how it went.”

  “It went fine.” Laura felt the comfort of her properly fed muscles moving in concert with her strong bones and oxygenated blood and waited for the endorphin rush that came with it. It happened without fail. She’d been eating right and exercising so long that her body moved like a well-tended machine, and she swore there were days when she could feel every part in perfect harmony with every other.

  “Fine? All I’m getting…is fine. I’m power-walking with you…at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning while…pushing a twenty-three-pound baby…in a stroller…and…all I’m getting is…fine?” Dixie stopped, breathing heavily. “I want more than…that…or I’m leaving you.my baby and going to Dunkin’ Donuts.”

  Laura ran lightly in place. “That’s no threat,” she said, grinning as she smiled down at the baby and it giggled up at her. “Sammie and I love each other, and if you do scarf a dozen doughnuts, you’ll be so penitent and regretful in class tomorrow night that you won’t even groan while I work you to death.”

  Dixie sighed in defeat. “All right. Then, take pity on me because I’m nosy.” She began to push the stroller again.

  Laura walked in step with her. “Okay, we had a great time,” she said, pumping her arms. She blamed Dixie’s slower pace and incessant questions for the fact that she couldn’t concentrate on her exercise this morning. But the truth was that her mind was too cluttered with fears, longings, recriminations and memories for her to abandon herself to the demands of her body. “Jason Warfield is very charming company.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Well…it was a dinner.”

  Dixie shook her head pityingly. “Please don’t recite the menu. What did you do?”

  Laura unknotted the sweater tied at her waist and pulled it on. The breeze from the ocean had a little early morning bite to it. “His speech was funny,” she said, sidestepping the more personal stuff, “and I met a few people from Boston who are summering here.”

  Dixie obviously wasn’t satisfied.

  “We danced,” Laura added, unable to prevent a little smile as she remembered how nice that had been. She could recall clearly the moment she’d stepped into his arms and how right it had felt. If she concentrated, she could still feel his arms around her. “He’s a good dancer. Not…showy, you know, but…nice.”

  Dixie stopped at a stone bench in the wall that bowed out into the sand at the end of Farnham’s quiet main street. In another few hours it would be filled with tourists, bicycles, kites and dogs, but now it was still—just a breeze blowing colorful wind socks, banners and awnings.

  “When did he kiss you?” Dixie asked. She turned the toddler toward the street so that she could watch the colorful flutter.

  Laur
a suddenly lost all heart for resistance. She told Dixie everything she thought and felt, how she’d lain awake reliving every moment of the evening and seeing Jason’s image in her mind’s eye when he said goodbye.

  He’d smiled warmly, told her he’d enjoyed her company, but he’d said nothing about seeing her again.

  “Well,” Dixie said practically, “you ran away from him in the middle of a kiss!”

  “Only because it was so…powerful. Everything inside me was shaking. My mind was all muddled. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t…figure it out.”

  “Why do you have to?”

  “Because it’s my life!” Laura said impatiently, getting to her feet and turning to the ocean, one knee on the bench as she leaned against the wall. “I’ve only known him a few weeks, I’ve only seen him a handful of times, but the minute he took me in his arms I knew…” She hesitated and heaved a sigh. “I knew he was going to change everything.”

  Sammie fussed, and Dixie handed her a bag of raisins. “What everything? He’s going to change your lonely life of work and exercise? Is that a bad thing?”

  Laura frowned at her. “I like my lonely little life.”

  Dixie made a scornful sound. “No, you don’t. You pretend to because you built it yourself. But deep down, you want what I have.”

  Laura repeated the scornful sound. “Three children under seven, sleepless nights and never a moment to call my own?”

  “A man who loves you,” Dixie corrected her gravely. “A man who’ll give you his children. A man who’ii stay.”

  “He already has children.”

  “Then, so will you. Maybe he’ll give you more.”

  Laura sat down again, accepting that everything Dixie said was true. She did want all those things. She just didn’t trust anyone to give them to her.

  “He loved his wife very much,” she said. “He said she was…’beautiful,’“ she quoted. “‘Wonderful. Remarkable.”‘

  “Then, he’ll want another happy marriage. It’s statistical.”

  “But I’m…” Laura groped for the right word. Selfanalysis was difficult. “Opinionated, a little stiff, a little.demanding of the people in my life.”

  “Yes, you are,” Dixie agreed with an affectionate smile that took the sting out of it. “You’ll have to work on that. I know that generally you’re not one to compromise what you believe, but in this case—dealing with men and children—the simple truth is that a lot of compromise is required on a woman’s part. But it reaps many benefits. Not right away. And not always in great amounts. But it does insidiously wonderful things to your life that you’ll find you can’t live without.” She stood, adjusting the baby’s hat. Then she looked Laura in the eye. “I think you should go visit him and tell him you want another shot at that kiss.”

  “That’s crazy.” Laura stood, too, digging into her fanny pack for car keys.

  “Love is fueled by craziness. Want to stop for coffee and a doughnut?”

  “Just coffee.”

  “Did I mention that you’re uncompromising?”

  Free of afternoon appointments the following day, Laura left the office early and spent several hours making a carrot cake for Jason’s boys. Dixie was crazy. She couldn’t possibly ask Jason to try the kiss again, but she could visit him on the pretext of bringing a healthy dessert to the boys and hope that he brought up the subject of last night so she could then tell him that panic had accounted for her behavior, and in the light of day she saw things more clearly and was more hopeful than frightened by what might develop between them.

  She stared at the finished cake for fifteen minutes as she considered the possibility that he would tell her to take her cake and give it to someone who was willing to deal with the kind of paranoia from which she suffered.

  She covered the cake with plastic wrap, placed it in a flat box on the passenger seat of her car and decided that rejection was probably preferable to the regret she would feel if she didn’t try.

  She drove across the small town to the highway that paralleled the ocean, then took the turn that led up the hill to the exclusive community where Jason lived.

  She was half a block away from his house and rehearsing what she would say when she saw the blondes. They stepped out of a little green MG that had just pulled into the driveway when Jason walked out his front door, arms open.

  One of the blondes was a little taller than the other and wore her hair straight and loose. It flew out behind her like a banner as she ran into his arms, tanned legs in small white shorts flashing.

  The other blonde, rounder, more voluptuous, with her hair piled in a loose knot atop her head but with the same great legs in khaki shorts also hurried into his embrace. He picked them both up off the walk, and all three laughed and hugged as though they had delicious things planned for the balance of the afternoon.

  Laura felt a stabbing pain to her midsection. Fury simmered in bitter disappointment inside her as she watched Jason and the blondes disappear into the house.

  By the time she backed into the nearest driveway and headed back down the hill, self-recrimination was added to the fury and disappointment and she had a serious stew under way.

  She was not at all surprised when Jason missed that night’s class. Well, she told herself as she worked her students hard, what else did she expect? She’d left him with the impression that she was afraid of a relationship with him, and he, being a man and true to the species as she knew it, didn’t bother grieving over her or expending energy trying to cajole her into giving it a try. He simply moved on—and in rare form, apparently.

  She’d known how it would all turn out in the beginning; she’d just let herself be deluded by his exceptional charm, by his beautiful children, and by a lifetime of wishing desperately that there was something other than what she had.

  She came to terms with it in her head. She simply couldn’t accept it in her heart. And that was the trouble, she knew. A few thin weeks in his company and she was already thinking emotionally rather than logically. Jason had poisoned her with his brown eyes and his gentle touch.

  By Wednesday evening, her stew of self-recrimination, anger and disappointment had fermented and was bubbling away inside her. All attempts to reason herself out of what she felt had failed. So she was living with it, but not well.

  When she started the warm-up routine and saw Jason come loping through the doors at the last minute to take his place beside Philly with a smiling greeting, her pot of fermenting stew began to boil over.

  It propelled her with more force than complex carbohydrates. She picked the hardest routines, ran them longer and ignored the concerned glances from her students. Jason and Philly leaned against each other in laughing exhaustion during the brief break before she went to the floor work.

  That spurred her on to even more merciless measures, completely oblivious to the strain and pain herself as she again chose the upper body side lifts everyone hated, added more push-ups to an already grueling routine and more reps to the leg lifts that had everyone groaning before they’d even started.

  By cool-down, two students had left, two were lying on their backs on their mats, panting, and the others were only halfhearted in their efforts to follow her.

  Two of the students were glaring at her. One was Dixie. The other was Jason.

  Everyone wandered off dispiritedly when she’d finished, apparently too weak to applaud themselves. Laura disappeared into the bathroom backstage where she sometimes changed when she was going out after class, and simply hid out until everyone was gone.

  She was doing it because she didn’t want to explode, she told herself. It wasn’t cowardice, it was…discretion.

  Ten minutes later Laura opened the door, sure everyone would be gone. Most of her students hurried home to families immediately after class, propelled by the guilt of having left them for the hour’s exercise. Even Dixie, who logged the day’s receipts for her, never stayed beyond tallying up the cash box. She always left it on the edge of the sta
ge.

  Laura went to pick it up and gather up her purse and bag.

  She stopped abruptly, her heart lurching at the sight of Jason sitting cross-legged beside it. He’d changed into a fresh shirt as he always did after class, and the plain black T seemed to further darken his already black-brown eyes.

  “Yes?” she asked stiffly, picking up the cash box and stuffing it into her athletic bag.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw him unfold gracefully to his feet. Only three classes, she thought absently, and his movements were already more fluid.

  “It wasn’t hard to see that something was bothering you tonight,” he said quietly, his voice also a little stiff. “I wanted to know if it had anything to do with us.”

  “Us?” She pushed the table that held her tape player and tapes back into the wings and tossed her bag and purse onto the auditorium floor. She spoke calmly despite the fermented stew boiling over inside her. “There is no us.”

  She leapt off the stage.

  Jason leapt also and landed a little ahead of her to prevent her escape. He caught her arm in a gentle grip. His eyes studied hers, obviously trying to read what was on her mind. She thought that amazing. Of course, he didn’t know she’d seen the blondes.

  “So, that’s official, then?” he asked evenly. “I got the impression you were more concerned that a relationship between us might be too good rather than too bad, and that you were going to think it over.”

  She pulled away from him and picked up her bag and purse. “I did think it over,” she said, a tinge of sadness reflected in the anger in her voice.

  He let her walk past him without stopping her. That surprised her. Then, as she headed for the door, he said, “I can’t believe you couldn’t see the possibilities.”

  That stopped her cold. Sadness fled and all she felt was the anger—full and hot, exuding from her pores. She turned and marched back to him, the bad stew exploding.

  “I saw the possibilities, Jason,” she said when she had reached him, straining up in a nose-to-nose, in-your-face offensive. “But I imagined they existed between you and me and not between you and a couple of blondes. Or is that among you and the blondes because blondes is plural!”