by Noelle Adams
“Are they all right?” he asked, leaning over to get a look at how well-done the rolls had ended up.
“Yeah,” she said, relief evident in her tone, “They’re not burned. Just a little browner than I usually make them.”
She already seemed to know her way around the kitchen, since she easily found a big plate and two knives. She grabbed each hot cinnamon roll between her finger and thumb and quickly dropped them over onto the plate.
“You should wait until they cool down a little,” he said, when she blew on her fingers.
She frowned. “They need to be iced while they’re hot.”
“Ah. I didn’t know there was icing.”
“Of course, there’s icing!” She brought the plate over to the bar and, after picking up a little tub of white icing, she handed him a knife.
Paul took the knife automatically and then stared at it in his hand blankly.
Emily climbed back onto her stool, grinning. “Now,” she said, as if she was making a great concession, “You can help, but you can’t hog the icing. They never give us enough in these little tubs.”
He watched as she scooped an enthusiastic amount of thick icing onto her knife.
As she slathered the icing onto the biggest of the five large cinnamon rolls, he dipped his own knife in the icing. He’d never iced cinnamon rolls before, but it seemed to be a fairly simple process, so he moved one of the rolls on the plate closer to him and coated the top smoothly.
Emily was already digging into the tub with her knife for more, but she paused to watch him. “You don’t have to be so neat,” she told him with another frown.
Paul blinked in surprise. He hadn’t been trying to make his icing neat, but a quick glance from his to Emily’s haphazardly iced roll made the difference clear.
“You have to go fast, or they’ll start to get cold,” Emily added, smearing the icing on a second roll.
Paul obediently sped up his icing process on the second of his cinnamon rolls. Then, while Emily iced the final one, he used the remainder of the icing to add to the rolls that had been cheated.
“Now, then,” Emily said, her eyes laughing as she put down her knife on the counter and picked up the roll with the most icing. “Finally.”
He watched in amusement as she took a big bite and closed her eyes with a little moan of pleasure.
When she opened her eyes, she gestured toward the plate. “Aren't you going to have one?”
Paul picked one up and took a bite. It was too sweet, of course, but the taste matched the warm, pleasant scent, and he realized he was hungry.
They each ate two of the cinnamon rolls. When Paul was returning to his stool after refilling both of their coffee mugs, he noticed Emily eyeing the last roll greedily.
“You can have it,” he told her, marveling that she could eat so much when she seemed so small to him. He wasn’t so foolish as to tell her that, of course.
She shook her head with a little smile and pulled the last one apart, offering him one very messy half.
Paul didn’t really want it, but he ate it anyway.
Emily gave a happy sigh as she finished, but then she put a hand on her stomach. “Oh, I feel sick. I ate too much.”
He couldn’t help but laugh.
“You shouldn’t mock me when you reaped the benefits of my culinary energies this morning.”
“I did,” he acknowledged, trying to suppress another ripple of laughter. “And I greatly appreciate it.”
Paul felt a little sticky from the icing, so he got up to wash his hands. When he returned to the bar, he saw that Emily had gone back to her smart phone.
“How’s Chris?” he asked casually.
“He’s fine. I talked to him last night.” Then she seemed to realize what had prompted the question. “Oh, I’m not texting Chris. I was just reading.”
“What are you reading?” Paul asked, leaning over from his stool to peer at the screen of her phone.
Emily looked a little sheepish, but she replied readily enough. “Shakespeare.” At his questioning look, she explained, “One of the things on my list is to read all of Shakespeare’s plays. I still have a ways to go.”
“Which one are you on?” he asked.
“Coriolanus,” she said with a curl of her mouth.
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
She shook with laughter at his dry tone. Then she explained, “I’ve read all the normal ones. Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Merchant of Venice.” She paused, evidently trying to think if she’d forgotten anything. “So now I’m stuck with the less appealing ones. I haven’t even started the history plays yet, since they scare me.”
“Actually, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V, and Richard III are really good. You’ll probably like them. But I’m afraid you do still have some rough going. Wait until you get to Titus Andronicus.”
“Don’t scare me this early.” Emily made a face, but then she squared her shoulders. “But I can do it. I’m a pretty fast reader, although it’s harder to get through Shakespeare than it is a novel.”
“The more you read of him, the easier it gets. After a few more plays, you’ll probably be able to get through them pretty quickly.” He thought through the list she’d just rehearsed. “Wait, you haven’t read Hamlet?”
“Not yet. It was never assigned in school, and now I’m saving it until the end.” She glanced away, a flicker of emotion on her face. “I mean the end of the plays.”
“I know,” he said quietly, his relaxed mood subdued by this reminder of the shortness of her life. “It will be a great one to read last. If someone was only going to read one work from all of English literature, it should be Hamlet.”
He suddenly realized he sounded rather nerdy. He couldn’t remember ever feeling that way before.
He had no idea what had happened to him in the last six months.
She smiled, evidently not thinking there was anything unusual about his discoursing on literature. “Then I’ll have it to look forward to, since you like it so much.”
Paul cleared his throat and returned to a less emotionally-charged topic. “Why are you trying to read the plays on your phone? That can’t be easy.”
“It’s fine. I don’t have copies of most of them, but they're all available for free online. I use my computer too, when it’s convenient.”
“That’s ridiculous. I’ll buy you copies of them. You’ll strain your eyes trying to read that way, and it will take even longer to get through them.”
“I don’t like for you to have to buy me everything. It will be a waste of money, since I won’t be around for—”
“Paperbacks don’t cost that much,” he interrupted, feeling a familiar swell of frustration at her stubbornness. “Actually, I think I have something here…”
He got up before Emily could argue and walked back to his office, trying to force down his annoyance.
He’d meant what he told her in the car on Friday night about trying not to bulldoze her. He’d resolved to try to hear her side of things and make any compromises he could legitimately make.
But he’d never met anyone who could drive him so crazy with her stubborn unwillingness to accept help.
When he got to his office, he scanned the bookshelves for his Shakespeare. Not finding it, he went to search the bookshelves in his bedroom instead. There, he found the big Riverside Shakespeare he’d gotten in college and pulled it off the shelf.
As he carried it back into the kitchen, he saw that Emily was sprawled over the bar again. She’d confiscated his newspaper, but at the moment she was reaching over to get the last of the icing off the plate with her finger.
She was sitting on her folded legs again, which he couldn’t believe was very comfortable. She leaned forward, bracing her weight on her forearms on the counter with the newspaper spread out in front of her.
Her top was riding up on her back, a
nd he could see a wide expanse of smooth, fair skin. Her position had caused the waistband of her pajama pants to dip low at the back, revealing the top of what looked like blue cotton underwear.
For a moment, he was startled by how lush the curve of her ass was, the rounded shape highlighted by her position and the thinness of the fabric stretched over it. A flash of physical interest surprised him as he stared at the deeply curved line from her slim waist to her full hips.
It only took a few seconds for him to realize what he was doing. He jerked his gaze away with a guilty cringe.
He was not—not—going to be that man. The man who leched after a vulnerable seventeen-year-old just because she happened to be available.
If only he hadn’t instinctively turned around when she'd squealed getting out of the water on Friday night. She’d ducked down immediately, but he’d still had time to see her. While he’d been too surprised to immediately register what he’d seen, it didn’t take long for his mind to catch up. After she’d hugged him and he’d noticed the way her dress clung to her breasts, he’d finally processed the memory of her walking out of the lake like a naked, sopping-wet Aphrodite.
Her skin was pale, and it had almost glowed in the moonlight. Her breasts were full and firm with peaked nipples, bouncing slightly with her motion in the hip-deep water.
And, damn it, his body was interested in that memory.
Paul's body clearly had none of the scruples that his mind had, but he refused to let it do what it wanted. This was too important. These were the last weeks of Emily’s life.
He was going to do right by her, no matter what it took. He was not at the mercy of his passing sexual interests, and so far he’d been fairly successful in not entertaining sexual thoughts about his wife.
But it would have been easier if he hadn’t seen her naked.
“What’s that?” Emily asked, looking back and catching him standing there like an idiot.
“Shakespeare.” He pulled himself together and walked over to place the book on the counter beside her. “It will be easier to read the plays this way.”
“Thanks,” she said with a smile. “Although the size of that book is a little intimidating.”
He returned her smile, relieved that he’d once again managed to lock away any inappropriate thoughts about her where they wouldn’t trouble him. “You’ll get through them all faster than you think.”
She murmured thanks and fanned through the pages of the large book, and the position of her arm suddenly highlighted something he hadn’t noticed before.
With a sharp inhalation, Paul grabbed her bare arm and pulled it into a position where he could see it better.
“Hey, what are you doing?” she demanded, trying to free her arm.
Paul stared down, horrified, at a line of faint bruises that were clearly made by someone’s fingers.
His fingers.
He let her arm drop loosely and stood frozen in place, slammed with waves of intense guilt and self-disgust. She was small and sick and vulnerable and young. And, in his anger, he had manhandled her violently enough to leave bruises.
Emily’s face reflected bewilderment, and she tried to look over her shoulder, down at whatever he’d seen on the back of her upper-arm.
She must have figured it out because she rolled her eyes. “Don’t be melodramatic. I just bruise easily.”
Paul didn’t respond. He’d made a lot of mistakes in his life. He’d done a lot of things he wished he hadn’t. But he’d never believed himself to be the kind of man who would hurt a woman.
“Paul, I mean it,” she snapped, “You didn’t hurt me. I didn’t even know the bruises were there.” When he still didn’t answer, she added, “I shouldn’t have been running away.”
“So that means you deserved to be…to be…”
“To be what?” she demanded, “What exactly do you think you did to me? You grabbed me to keep me from getting in the cab, and you squeezed harder than you meant to. You didn’t assault me or anything.”
He wasn’t sure if he could allow himself to take comfort in her words. He’d been so angry on Friday night. When Tim had told him that his wife had somehow managed to get into the main parking deck of the building, he’d been swallowed up in a kind of panic, afraid she would get away, get hurt, get killed—and he would have utterly failed in his commitment to take care of her.
She’d just been half a block away, hailing a cab, when he made it outside. The look on her face—a kind of secret exhilaration—had snapped his control. How dare she look like that, when he’d felt so worried and helpless.
“Paul!” Emily’s sharp words broke through his bleak reflections. “You’re being ridiculous. If you’re not going to let me be ridiculous, then I’m not going to let you be ridiculous either. Do you really think I’d trust you if you’d hurt me? I let you take me skinny-dipping right afterwards! Would I have trusted you like that if you’d been…been what you’re thinking?”
Paul blinked, something in her words getting through to him. He cleared his throat. “Emily, I didn’t mean to—”
“I know you didn’t mean to! What the hell do you think I’m trying to tell you, you big dumbass?”
Paul had never been called a dumbass before. Not to his face, at least. Despite his relief at her words, he didn't really appreciate the name-calling.
They glared at each other for a minute, and then he saw her mouth tighten with irrepressible irony. He couldn’t help but half-smile back. “Okay. The only other thing I'll say is that it won’t happen again.”
“Good. And I won’t run away again. So we’re even.”
She seemed to think that resolved matters, so Paul had no choice but to give the subject up.
They drank more coffee and read the newspapers in companionable silence, until Paul’s phone rang a half-hour later.
He walked out of the kitchen as he took it, but when he returned he was quite pleased with himself. “I got your skydiving scheduled for Tuesday,” he told Emily, who’d glanced up at his return.
Her eyes widened. “So soon? I thought it would have to be later in the week.”
“I can reschedule if you want. I just thought you’d want to do it as soon as possible.”
“I do.” She swallowed visibly. “Thank you. And maybe it’s just as well that I don’t have so much time before it happens, so I can't work myself into a panic about it.”
Paul sat down with his newspaper again. "You'll do fine. It won't be nearly as frightening as you think."
"You're coming with me, aren't you?"
For as long as he’d known her, she’d always tried to act invulnerable—like the only person she could rely on was herself.
He wondered what he'd done to deserve the trust in her eyes. All he said was, "Of course."
***
Paul had gone skydiving for the first time when he’d been eighteen, and since then he’d logged over a hundred and fifty jumps.
For a couple of years, he’d been obsessed with it. He’d tried a number of other extreme sports—bungee jumping, caving, cliff diving, extreme skiing—but nothing had attracted him like skydiving.
He understood what most people were looking for in such activities. He understood the compulsion of the challenge, the rush of adrenalin, the heady sense of defying limits.
Paul hadn’t taken up skydiving only for those reasons, though. He was sure a psychiatrist could analyze him and develop a complex theory about his adolescent rebellion against authority and his emotional insecurity—caused primarily by a tyrannical father who didn’t love him.
Looking back now, Paul could put it more simply. There was a moment, after the doors of the plane would opened, as he was poised above a blinding height and about to let go of anything secure, when he’d felt like he was going to die. That had been the point back then.
Paul had jumped out of a plane a hundred and fifty-two times in his life because he just hadn’t cared if he died.
His life had changed a lot s
ince then, but as they took off for their jump on Tuesday, every detail of the experience was familiar. The vibrations of the plane, the loud roar of the engine, the throbbing pulse of his blood, the faint, bitter beginnings of adrenalin in his mouth, the weight of the gear on his back. It all felt the same as it used to.
Except now Paul had a wife who was sitting beside him.
And he didn’t really want to jump.
He was going to, of course. Jumping wasn’t that big a deal to him, and Emily was counting on him to be with her in this. Because of his training and experience, Paul was licensed to jump solo, although technically this was his recurrency jump and had to be done in the presence of an instructor.
There was absolutely nothing challenging to him about the jump today, but he wasn’t really having fun.
Emily was scared and trying not to show it. She was doing a pretty good job, but Paul could see her hands were trembling and her face was very pale.
She’d seemed excited this morning, and she’d enjoyed the instruction she’d gotten earlier, but, once they’d gotten into the plane, her very natural fear had caught up with her. Paul had been chatting with her casually in an attempt to distract her, telling her about some of the jumps he’d taken with Mike and Russ a few years back. She was trying to focus on what he told her and smiled or murmured at the right spots, but he could tell her nerves were making it hard for her to think about anything except the jump.
Paul had learned to skydive from Mike and Russ—the best instructors in the region. They worked out of a drop zone just outside of Philadelphia, and Paul had done most of his jumps with them. Naturally, he’d arranged to schedule Emily’s skydiving experience with them as well.
Russ was already hooked up to jump tandem with Emily. He was in his “zone,” as he called it—staring out at the sky and ignoring any and all attempts to talk to him. But Mike was making jokes, trying to help Emily relax, and he kept giving Paul amused, ironic glances.
Paul knew why.
Mike thought his old friend, who had once been as wild as they came, had gone soft and domestic, and he was getting a big kick out of that incongruity.
Paul was doing his best to ignore it.
