Once More With Feeling

by Megan Crane

  ‘So,’ I said into the taut silence. ‘Um. Is that what you’re wearing to your sister’s?’

  His smile deepened, and his hands tightened against my legs and then let go.

  ‘Your loss,’ he whispered.

  And I couldn’t help but agree.

  Alec drove us over through the quiet, snowy streets, brooding the whole way, as if Christmas Eve were a torture designed specifically to hurt him and his sister’s house was his personal Guantanamo Bay.

  ‘You’re scowling like the Grinch,’ I told him mildly from the passenger seat. ‘Not that I mind necessarily, but you run the risk of scaring small children away. Maybe that’s your goal?’

  ‘You’re hilarious.’

  But his expression lightened.

  Jen’s house down in the village was cheerful and bright, and was overflowing with holiday spirit. Holly garlands, ropes of pine, and two separate Christmas trees. Mistletoe in every doorway. Fat stuffed Santas, mischievous elves, and blinking reindeer arranged just so on the front lawn. Carols poured from the speakers and the tables were laden down with piles of holiday delicacies. Children and dogs charged through the happy rooms, and everyone inside greeted Alec with a warm smile. It was like stepping into a living, breathing Christmas card. I couldn’t decide if I loved it or hated it, or if I had a whole host of far more complicated reactions altogether, so I helped myself to a cup of thick, rich eggnog liberally laced with rum and decided not to ask myself questions that had no right answers.

  ‘Are you happy?’ Alec muttered at his sister when we found her in the kitchen, her cheeks red and hair curling as she wrestled with something in a giant pot on the stovetop. ‘I’m here.’

  ‘I’m so proud,’ she told him, reaching up and patting his cheek, clearly just to annoy him – and just as clearly, succeeding. ‘If you hadn’t turned up, I was sending Mike over with the pickup truck and a tranquillizer gun. I think you made the right call.’

  Was that a slight smile I saw on Alec’s mouth? I stood a little bit apart from him and his sister and the genial, grinning man I assumed was Mike, her husband. This was Alec’s family. This was the life Alec claimed not to want any part of and acted all grumpy about and yet returned to, if what they were saying was true, every holiday season without fail. Something about that made me ache.

  And then he glanced towards me, as if making sure I was still there, and my heart squeezed just that little bit tighter in my chest.

  He looked wild and impossible tonight, in a black sweater that did remarkable things to his already fascinating torso, and a slightly less battered pair of jeans. I had done what I could with the few things I’d thrown in the car with me when I’d left Rivermark, which meant nothing more than a different, marginally more festive sweater, and I’d tried to do something with my hair.

  Alec’s hair, of course, all but stood on end, and I realized as I watched him interact – or not – with the townspeople that he did that deliberately. It marked him as the mad doctor, always off saving the world, or as a bad-tempered curmudgeon years before his time when he was home. Yet none of his friends, neighbours, or family members seemed to take his crankiness amiss. If anything, they seemed to encourage it; laughing at his snarky little comments as if he were trying to be funny.

  Maybe he was, I thought then, with a sense of something like wonder that I’d never considered that possibility before. Like most realizations where Alec was concerned, however, it almost immediately made me feel maudlin. Sure, that could have been the eggnog, but why was I doing this to myself? Why was I exploring the mysteries of Alec Frasier when I already knew how this would end? How it had already ended? Why was I torturing myself?

  ‘You should eat something,’ he told me at one point, frowning at the glass I’d refilled with a little more holiday cheer.

  ‘Are you telling me that as my friend or my doctor?’ I asked, filled with bravado in the centre of such a pretty little party. And definitely feeling a little more irrationally irritated with him that I was willing to admit. I mean, why did he have to be so … him? Why hadn’t he become boring and unattractive in all these long, intervening years, like normal people would have? Like I had.

  ‘Am I either one of those things?’ he retorted, taking me by surprise, his gaze hard on mine.

  I didn’t know how to answer him, and so I didn’t, smiling instead at the matronly woman who came up to us then, her round face kind and beaming. If I was relieved at the interruption, I told myself she didn’t know me well enough to see it. I knew Alec did.

  ‘I taught him in the tenth grade,’ she told me after delivering a kiss to Alec’s cheek which made him redden slightly, though he grudgingly submitted to it. ‘He was horrible.’

  ‘I think you mean entirely too gifted and smart,’ he corrected her.

  ‘Horrible,’ she repeated, but she was still smiling. ‘If he could have led the entire class in a revolt, he would have. I’d never been so happy to see a student leave my class in all my years of teaching.’

  ‘I was very intelligent,’ Alec told me, as if he were telling me a secret, but his dark eyes were bright and fixed on his teacher. ‘I was just bored. Constantly, terribly bored.’

  ‘He was a holy terror,’ the woman told me. She also patted Alec’s cheek, which I noticed had gone faintly red again.

  ‘They really like to pat your cheeks,’ I noted, when she’d moved on and Alec was leaning back against the wall in the corner again, looking cool and remote and on the verge of snide, as his sister had predicted he would.

  ‘They’re convinced that if they keep touching me, it will humanize me,’ he said in that mild tone that made me grin despite myself. ‘I think they saw it on some wilderness show. It’s that or throw raw meat at my feet. To be honest, sometimes I think I’d prefer the steak.’

  ‘You really are completely antisocial, aren’t you?’ I asked. ‘I always thought that was a doctor thing. But it’s a you thing, isn’t it?’

  Alec gazed at me for a moment then. I understood, somehow, that if we’d been alone he would have touched me, and that he didn’t because we were standing in the middle of a crowd, all of whom were watching us as closely as possible from the corners of their eyes. She’s not his girlfriend, I don’t think, I’d heard Jen tell someone in a stage whisper earlier. But I know she was his girlfriend a long time ago, so …

  So, I echoed in my own head. So what?

  ‘One feeds on the other,’ he said gruffly. ‘At the end of the day, I’m more interested in healing people than getting to know them. I guess that makes me an uncomfortable dinner date.’

  ‘Who would want to date you?’ I asked, in such a deliberately insulting way that he actually laughed. I caught a series of surprised looks from the people clustered around the baked brie.

  ‘I told you,’ he said with a certain edge to his voice, like he was throwing down some kind of gauntlet. ‘I’m no monk. An arrogant asshole most of the time, yes. But not a monk.’

  ‘I never said people didn’t want to sleep with you, Alec,’ I said with an exaggerated sigh. I waved my glass of eggnog at him and very deliberately did not think of the Audreys and the Madelines and the Elises of the world, all of whom, I felt sure, knew exactly how monkish he wasn’t. ‘I mean, look at you. You’re hot, sure. But a dinner date? I don’t think so. You’d probably mortally offend everyone in the restaurant, including the cook.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jen’s husband Mike said, coming up next to us and grinning at me, then at Alec, wearing a jolly sort of red-and-green sweater that should have looked sad and silly but on a happy guy like him just looked like fun. ‘She’s been out to dinner with you then, huh?’

  Alec only shook his head, but I could see the smile he tried to hide, and it made something shift inside me. Too hard, and too fast, like heavy furniture on a steeply tilting boat, about to lose itself to the waves. I was capsizing right there, in full view of an entire Vermont town, Alec himself, an oozing platter of baked brie, and a life-sized stuffed versio
n of Frosty the Snowman, complete with corncob pipe, grinning maniacally at me from the corner.

  And that was the moment I realized, once and for all, that I was a complete and utter fool. That I should never have come here. And that I needed to go home immediately.

  Before it all got even worse.

  15

  ‘Why are you so quiet all of a sudden?’ Alec asked in his gruffest voice as he aimed the Jeep back toward his discordantly cheerful house up on the rise on the other side of the frozen river.

  I stared out of the front windshield and I could see it up there ahead of us, that warm and affable sprawl of a farmhouse, the few lights he’d left on shining out proudly against the thick night. Like some kind of beacon. Or in my case, probably more of a lighthouse, warning of the rocks dead ahead.

  I had to get out of here. I had to get away. It felt like a physical necessity, not a decision.

  It was sometime before midnight on Christmas Eve and all I wanted to do was cry. I wanted to curl up into my tears and let them dissolve me. Everything felt too big, too unwieldy, too impossible. Too wrong. I felt small and insignificant, and not in a good, properly awed sort of way, the way I sometimes did when I stared at the ocean. I felt as if the searing cold of the sky above and all the millions of stars were witness to this petty and broken little life of mine, and yet I had nothing to show for myself. Not even after these forays into the past. There was only my doomed marriage and my broken family I was trying to pretend didn’t exist tonight. And this thing between us that felt so alive in the Jeep with us now, that kept me trembling slightly, deep inside, like my muscles wanted to fling themselves apart. I didn’t know what it was. What this was. Much less what the hell I was doing here, now, when I already knew how this story ended. I felt like I was made of glass, about to shatter, and the next faint breeze or dark look from Alec might send me right over the edge.

  ‘This has been so great,’ I said hollowly, woodenly. Desperately. I stared at my fingers fiercely as I laced them together in my lap. ‘Really. You didn’t have to spend all this time with me. I descended on you with no warning, and you hardly see your family as it is. You didn’t have to take my little breakdown so seriously. Anyway, I appreciate it.’ I cleared my throat in the tense silence. ‘More than you know.’

  ‘Oh, are we making speeches now?’ His tone was acidic. A lash. ‘I forgot to write mine.’

  ‘It’s been so good to see you, Alec,’ I said in the most friendly tone I could manage, looking over at him. The intermittent street lights played over the stark, lean lines of his face, making him appear far more beautiful than he should. Than anyone should. ‘I hope we really can be friends this time. I’d really like that.’

  His jaw moved then, but he didn’t speak, and I thought he seemed to grip the wheel tighter than necessary. I worked my interlocked fingers all the tighter in my lap.

  ‘Are you about to burst into song or something, Sarah?’ he asked in a clipped voice. I felt the way he didn’t look at me like a slap. ‘Or is this your shitty way of saying goodbye? Again?’

  ‘I’m just going to jump in the car when we get to your place,’ I said, as if I couldn’t hear everything seething in him that made him talk in that way. As if I weren’t perfectly well aware that his temper was heating up. As if I couldn’t tell. ‘It makes sense. You have Christmas morning with your family and I should get home anyway. It should be a really easy drive tonight.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he asked, as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. As if he didn’t want to hear any of it. As if I were a raving lunatic.

  ‘Come on.’ I was frustrated suddenly – and furious, just like that. Like some switch flipped in me. ‘You’re temporary, Alec. That’s all you ever were, or want to be. And that’s not what I want. It never was.’

  ‘Define “temporary”,’ he gritted out. ‘Because I seem to remember that we were together for a year.’

  I shifted in the seat, turning to glare at him. Hard at that lean cheek nearest me, like I could bore holes into it, through it, with my eyes alone.

  ‘When does your plane leave?’ I demanded. A muscle moved in his jaw, and I knew he was clenching it. ‘I know you already have your ticket. You always do. When?’

  ‘January.’ He looked as if he were biting back other words. Harsher words. Or maybe he really didn’t want to answer. ‘The fifteenth.’

  ‘So.’ I didn’t know why I’d wanted confirmation of that. It turned out, I really didn’t. ‘Don’t pretend you’re someone you’re not, Alec. I never do.’

  He stamped on the brake then, bringing the Jeep to a sudden, slippery stop in the middle of the empty street. And then he … did nothing. The headlights poured over the road before us, looking rich and somehow thick against the night. I could hear the engine chugging along. The heater churned at my feet, not yet warm. He stared out ahead of us for what seemed like a very long time and then he turned his head to look at me, much too slowly and deliberately, and my skin prickled in reaction to the glittering look in that too-dark gaze of his.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ I whispered. ‘You know I’m right.’

  ‘You are so full of shit, Sarah,’ he said in that low, furious tone that I hadn’t heard in a long time. But I remembered it. It was as if I’d been waiting for it to reappear. To remind me of those last, terrible days with him. ‘Always have been, always will be. You think you’re digging around in your past? Is that what you call it? You show up married and weepy and suddenly wanting to talk about the relationship you walked away from years ago, but I’m the one who’s pretending?’

  ‘Just take me to my car.’ I bit the words out. ‘Can you do that? Or are we going to have a stupid fight right here in the middle of the road?’

  He threw the car back into gear then, skidding slightly, and drove. Too fast, but I didn’t care. I stared out the window and wondered why I felt so rough and unfinished inside. Like such a disappointment to myself. Like I’d just torn something apart, really ripped it into pieces irreparably, when that was the last thing I wanted. Wasn’t it? Or was the real problem that I still didn’t know what I wanted, even after all of this?

  Alec pulled up to the farmhouse and slammed out of the car. I followed more slowly, annoyed that I’d left my other clothes in the house and had to fetch them now. I wanted to leave. I wanted to just … leap in the car and drive. For hours. Like somewhere out there, on that dark highway, I would finally find what I was looking for. In that miserable little moment as he wrestled with the lock, I was sure I would. I had to. Didn’t I?

  Inside, I went up to the guest room and grabbed my things, ordering myself to calm down and breathe so I could get out of there as smoothly and easily as possible, and then as far away as possible – but I stopped when I heard the creak of floorboards behind me. I didn’t turn around.

  Maybe, I admitted to myself, I was afraid to.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, and the worst part was that his voice was so much softer than I expected it to be. Like this wasn’t a fight at all. Like he was as disappointed in me as I was.

  But I had to shove that aside. ‘I told you already.’

  ‘That doesn’t make it any less stupid,’ he said, and that was the voice I knew. That dark kick to it. That addictive hint of all his brilliance, his eternal impatience.

  I turned then, and there he was, standing in the doorway with his arms crossed and that considering expression on his face; everything I’d thought I’d wanted once and as frustratingly out of reach as ever.

  But he’s here, now, a treacherous little voice whispered. And so are you. Temporarily. Together. Maybe it would be crazy not to do this.

  And when I thought about it that way … what was I doing? Or really – why was I walking away from this now? It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. But if I already knew that, why not enjoy it – him – while I could?

  He felt the shift in me. Or maybe he saw it on my face. I didn’t know. But I watched his g
aze darken as I dropped my extra sweater on the bed and roamed closer to him. Experimentally. To see if all that heat and lust was still there when I was kind of mad at him, too.

  And it was. God. It was worse.

  ‘I’m married,’ I said. Because I felt as if I had to say it, even though I’d taken off those rings. Even though I had no plans to stay that way for long. Even though I understood that I was finally done with that big mess. Because despite all that, it was true. I knew what that made me. He should, too.

  He shrugged. ‘Barely.’

  ‘Everyone knows you shouldn’t sleep with your exes.’

  He shifted his stance slightly, and his dark eyes turned to fire.

  ‘And yet,’ he said in that sexy voice of his that made the kind of promises I knew he could keep, the kind he was best at, ‘everyone does it anyway.’

  I moved that final, suicidal, step closer.

  ‘You’re temporary, Alec,’ I whispered. I slid my hands onto his chest, and shivered when his arms came around me, pulling me flush against him. ‘You can’t even help it.’

  ‘You need a new definition of the word “temporary”,’ he said quietly, bringing that serious, impossible mouth so close to mine, as his hands found their way to the small of my back, the curve of my hip. So close. ‘Yours sucks.’

  ‘Because it’s true?’ I taunted him. I couldn’t seem to help myself.

  But I didn’t let him answer. I closed that final distance between us, arched against him, and licked my way into his mouth.

  And this time, I had no intention of stopping.

  And neither, I could tell, did he.

  It was as if we were possessed – like we thought someone might come busting in again and stop us. We stripped each other where we stood, our hands tangling in our shirts, laughing when we lost our balance, leaving what we took off of each other wherever it fell.

  He kissed me again and again. I clung to him. I reacquainted myself with the hot male scent of his skin, its smoothness and strength. And then, somehow, we were on the floor in a mess of inside-out clothes and hastily kicked-off shoes, and he was moving over me and then into me.