The Bridal Arrangement

by Cindy Gerard

  “So I would do anything to keep from being aware. I’d sing, or talk or laugh—anything.”

  He hadn’t known what to say. So he’d held her. And then she’d smiled up at him. “I used to be afraid. Not anymore. You gave that back to me. My self-awareness. Now I don’t want to miss anything. I want to know what my body says—the way it responds to you. The way my breath catches sometimes when I see you, the way a shiver runs along my arm when you touch me, or the way my heart beats, sometimes in my throat or my ears when you kiss me. I’m not afraid of feeling those…those physical reactions anymore. And I’m not afraid of giving up control the way I have to give up control to a seizure.”

  She’d hiked herself up on an elbow, her eyes full of emotion and wonder. “When…when you make love to me, it’s…it’s like I fly, Lee. I’ve always been so afraid of being out of control. But with you…it’s so wonderful. It’s so wonderful to let go.”

  He’d felt the sting behind his eyes and hadn’t even tried to deny the cause.

  “You’re wonderful,” he’d whispered. “And so very brave.”

  “I’m not brave.”

  But she was. She’d grown into a woman who had yet to realize her own strengths.

  He hadn’t told her that. She wouldn’t want to believe it, anyway. Just as he hadn’t told her that he loved her. Because for him, it was still hard to believe he had the capability. Ellie had moved past her fears, but he was still struggling. If he tried not to be aware, if he tried not to overthink it, maybe, just maybe, it would happen without him spoiling the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  So, no. He hadn’t told her he loved her. He’d shown her instead. With soul-deep kisses and the most gentle kind of love that he knew how to give, he’d taken her to that place where she could fly and not be afraid of the fall.

  That had been last night. Just last night.

  In the rocker in the corner of the bedroom, he looked from his tightly clasped hands to the woman, pale and exhausted, in the bed. He hadn’t been there to catch her this time. The helplessness of it ate at him.

  And no, he’d never understood fear.

  Not the way he understood it now.

  Ellie opened her eyes slowly. The sense of lethargy, the lingering headache, the dead weight of her legs and arms—they were all too familiar to her.

  It took only a few moments to understand what had happened, but as usual after a seizure, what she didn’t know was when. When did it happen? Where had she been? What had she done? How had she gotten into bed?

  She looked around her room, willed the clock on her bedside table into focus—11:52. Almost midnight. Almost midnight of what day? How many had she lost?

  “Hi,” a gruff voice said from across the room.

  She turned her head and saw Lee sitting in her rocker. His face looked haggard in the pale light that leaked in from the hall. His eyes looked weary.

  “Hi,” she whispered. She hadn’t wanted him to ever see her this way, even though she’d known it had been inevitable that he would. It still didn’t make it any easier to face him, to wonder what he’d seen and how he’d reacted. Had she done something horribly embarrassing? Had it repulsed him?

  She heard him cross the room. Felt his weight as he eased a hip onto the mattress.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Lost. Embarrassed. Angry. Confused. “Fine. I’m feeling fine.”

  He touched a hand to her hair. “And I’m Martha Stewart, but, hey, if you believe me, I’ll believe you. So…should we move on to the weather?”

  She smiled. He made it so easy to smile. “Dark. The weather forecast is dark.”

  He smiled too. “Well, that’s a relief. Now I can plan my night.”

  She snaked her hand out from under the covers. He took it in both of his, brought it to his lips.

  The breath he let out wasn’t at all steady. She understood then how upset he was. “I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t. Don’t even think it. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  But she did. She was sorry this was a part of her. His silence said he was sorry, too.

  “Do you need to get up?” he asked gruffly. “Use the bathroom? Are you hungry?”

  She shook her head on both counts.

  He watched her face. “Want some company in there?”

  A wave of tenderness, of gratefulness, of love washed through her. All she could do was nod.

  He was out of his clothes and burrowed next to her so fast she was hardly aware that he’d moved.

  “Wow,” she said when he’d wrapped himself around her and surrounded her with his heat.

  “Yeah,” he said, snuggling close. “Wow.”

  “You make everything good,” she said against his throat, and felt his lifeblood beating there.

  “You are everything good.” He pressed a kiss to her hair.

  And, wrapped in his arms, she fell asleep, less diminished and, because of his total acceptance, far more complete.

  It was hard to listen to him tell her about it. But the next morning, feeling much better though not fully recovered, she asked him to tell her what her parents never would.

  “What happened to me? What did I do?”

  He sat with her at the table, where the morning sun cut prisms through the ancient leaded-glass window, and told her what she wanted to know.

  He held her hands while he talked, slowly rubbing his thumb over the backs of her knuckles, his gaze drifting from there to her face and down again.

  When he finished, she sat back with a bewildered sigh. “That’s it?”

  He shrugged. “That’s everything.”

  He rose, refilled his coffee mug then poured her more tea.

  She was quiet for a long moment, digesting all he had told her. No, it hadn’t been pretty and, yes, it was difficult to hear, but it was also as if this huge black hole that was a part of her wasn’t as huge and as black as it had been.

  “You know those scary movies,” she began thoughtfully, “the ones where all through the movie you want to hide your eyes behind your hands because you don’t know what monster is going to jump out at you from the dark?”

  His gaze was intent on hers as he sat back down at the kitchen table. “I don’t hide behind my hands. Ever.”

  She smiled. At the wonderful way he had of giving import to what she was saying, yet turning a potentially dark conversation back toward the light.

  “Okay. So a big, brave, macho guy like you doesn’t hide behind his hands. But for a scaredy-cat like me who does, I’m terrified for the first three-fourths of the movie and then, when the monster finally makes his appearance, it’s really not so scary anymore. It was the unknown that was frightening. It’s still the unknown,” she added softly.

  She ran a thumb over the rim of her cup, thought for another long moment—thought of all her parents had given her and of this one thing they had withheld. “I wonder why they would never tell me.”

  “Maybe they thought it would upset you.”

  “Not knowing upset me. Imagining the awful things I could have done upset me. But now I know and it…it sounds pretty…I don’t know…uneventful, really.”

  “If you don’t count the fact that you scared ten years off my life.”

  Again she smiled. “Ten years? Hmm. Good thing I’m a sucker for older men.”

  He snagged her wrist, pulled her carefully onto his lap. Kissed her with feeling. “Damn good thing.”

  A couple of days later, when Lee mentioned his plan for a honeymoon and had asked Ellie to think of a spot she’d like to go, she’d been thinking Bozeman. Maybe Denver. He’d been thinking bigger, and a week later he delivered. He took her to New York City.

  They’d explored MOMA and the Frick. He’d taken her to Chinatown and Union Square, to Tavern on the Green and Phantom of the Opera. She’d cried at Ellis Island—“for those poor desperate souls”—and lost her breath at the top of the Empire State Building, gaped at the opulent extravagance of tea at the
Plaza Hotel and the elegance of a candlelit dinner at the Rainbow Room.

  And now they stood in the middle of Times Square with life and noise and excitement teeming around them like a wild carnival ride. It was their last night here. It was midnight and she was glowing. Tomorrow he would take her home. But first she wanted a midnight carriage ride around Central Park.

  “He’s from Dublin,” she whispered dreamily as they clip-clopped by Rockefeller Center and moved on toward St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “Imagine that. Our carriage driver is from Dublin.”

  Everything was a wonder to her. It showed in her eyes as she settled back and smiled, looking for all the world like Cinderella in her pumpkin coach, the night of the ball.

  He’d have given her a castle if he could have worked out a deal. He’d have given her anything. And as soon as they returned to Shiloh, he did what he could to lay the world at her feet—at least a new world for her.

  “But I don’t know anything about computers,” she said, when he’d finished setting up a new desktop model in her father’s den.

  “You don’t have to know much more than this.”

  He showed her how to boot up and how to log on to the Net. Then he gave her the address of a Web site dedicated to epilepsy.

  “I didn’t know,” she said, when he found her still in front of the monitor almost six hours later. “I didn’t have any idea.”

  “And now you do,” he said gently.

  The site was one of many that linked to others, where not only medical facts but also personal stories were posted and shared.

  She rose from her chair, tears in her eyes, and threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Lee. I feel like I know these people. I know what they feel. I live what they live. Thank you. I…I don’t even know how to explain how this makes me feel.”

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smiling and crying and laughing all at the same time. “It’s one thing to know you are one of many, but…it’s not the same as actually reading someone else’s story and knowing that they’ve been where you’ve been. It’s…it’s the difference between looking at a pie chart and eating a piece of pie,” she exclaimed with a huge grin. “It gives it texture and flavor and heart.”

  He looked into her smiling eyes and didn’t think he’d ever known anyone with more heart than she had.

  “Now tell me,” she demanded, and bounced back to the keyboard. “Tell me how I can talk to them.”

  “Tomorrow,” he insisted with a laugh, and tugged her into his arms. “Tomorrow will be soon enough. I’ve got something else in mind for you tonight.”

  Ellie had never been happier in her life. She felt as if she was bouncing around in a magic bubble, insulated from old memories and past hurts. It seemed too good to be real, too sweet to be true. And then it just got better.

  “Classes?” she said, when Lee came home from a trip to Bozeman one night and tossed some brochures from the community college onto the kitchen table. “What kind of classes?”

  “Take your pick.” He dug around for a course catalog and handed it to her. “I thought we could both take one. I could use a refresher on Excel for some spreadsheets I want to work up on the breeding program. You could take anything you like. Something on creative writing, maybe? Poetry? They have gardening classes and some art classes. Even a class on building a Web site.”

  She launched herself into his arms. Kissed him long and deep.

  “What?” he asked, grinning because she was so happy.

  “You.”

  “Okay.” He sat down on a kitchen chair and lifted her onto his lap so she was straddling him. “I’ll bite. Me what?”

  “You are a wonderful man.”

  “Because I brought you some course catalogs?”

  “Because—” she started unbuttoning his shirt “—because I love the idea of going to school.” She peeled the shirt back from his chest, nibbled on a spot just below his collarbone. “And because I love you,” she added shyly.

  When he only smiled, she started unbuttoning her own shirt. “And because you like page fifty-three as much as I do.”

  He let out a whoop of laughter. “You are an insatiable little wanton.”

  She bounced off his lap and headed for the stairs at a run. “Page fifty-three,” she reminded him with a huge grin.

  He was right behind her. “I’m too old for this.”

  It was her turn to laugh. “Come on, old man. I promise, I’ll go easy on you.”

  “The hell you will,” he growled, and catching her on the third step, tossed her over his shoulder and took the rest of the stairs two at a time.

  Ten

  Lee gathered the spread sheet he’d been working on and zipped it into his briefcase. Then he slipped out of the classroom and headed across the hall to wait for Ellie’s class to let out.

  They’d been making the trip to Bozeman for night classes twice a week for a little over a month now. It hadn’t taken but one class and he’d started struggling with some truths that had been easy to dismiss—or at least ignore—while the two of them had been fairly well isolated at Shiloh. Truths he couldn’t ignore any longer.

  Old man.

  She’d kidded him about being an old man on more than one occasion. Her teasing words had banged around in his head more and more often as the days went by—and now the joke wasn’t so funny. In fact, it was giving him a headache.

  Okay, so he may not be an old man, but Ellie was definitely a young woman—a fact that he’d never been more aware of since seeing her in a college setting.

  She was nineteen, for Pete’s sake, and she should have been given the chance to experience some of the things nineteen-year-olds are supposed to experience.

  Old man.

  He’d been fooling himself. All along he’d been fooling himself into believing that he done her a favor by marrying her.

  His expression grim, he looked through the textured-glass windowpane of her classroom door. She didn’t know he was there. Neither did the young stud putting on the moves, when Ellie laughed at something he said and smiled prettily up at him.

  The kid had the build of an athlete and the look of a ladies’ man, and Lee should be used to his—and every other man’s—reaction to her. She turned heads no matter where she went, and these college guys were perpetually on the make.

  He looked the younger man over and couldn’t shrug off the twinge of envy he’d tried to deny during the past couple of months. This guy was heartbreak material—even Lee could see that. He oozed confidence and charm and had a smile that no doubt had every coed within grinning distance drooling on their keyboards.

  He couldn’t have been more than twenty. Just as he couldn’t have known that he wouldn’t live to see twenty-one if he didn’t back away from his wife.

  Lee shoved open the door.

  “Lee.” Ellie’s smile grew wider when she saw him. “We’re just about done here but come look— look what John showed me. John, this is my husband, Lee Savage.”

  John should have had the sense to go about three shades of pale and the presence of mind to back off. When he did neither, but sized Lee up with a long, assessing once-over instead, Lee placed a hand on Ellie’s shoulder.

  It was sophomoric and proprietary, not to mention possessive and defensive, and there hadn’t been a damn thing he could do to stop himself. Ellie was oblivious to his ridiculous show of staking a claim.

  John, with a pointed look at Lee’s hand, gave a small but reluctant nod of concession.

  “Savage,” he said, and with a murmured goodbye to Ellie, strolled back to his computer.

  All the way home Lee had brooded about how he’d reacted, what he’d done, how it had made him feel. Most of all, though, he brooded about those truths that wouldn’t go away.

  When he’d returned to Shiloh, it had been with the conviction that Ellie had needed him to take care of her. It was obvious now, that all she’d ever needed was the chance to find out who she was and what she wanted. She hadn’t
needed him for that.

  In fact, it was becoming more and more apparent that she really hadn’t needed him for much of anything.

  Their classes ended mid-June, and Ellie was anxious to go to work setting up her own Web page.

  “I have so many plans,” she told John on the last day of class. “So many people I want to reach, so many invitations I want to extend to anyone and everyone who doesn’t understand…who might feel as alone as I did and who just need a chance to share what they’ve been through.”

  Aside from her plans for the Web page, one of the most wonderful things to have come out of her class was her friendship with John Tyler. When she’d encountered him that first session, she’d been a little nervous about having to see him on a regular basis. But they’d both grown up a lot since those hurtful years when he’d been, in his words, “a Neanderthal idiot” and she’d been, in her words, “a poor pitiful Pearl.” All those years that she’d harbored resentment toward him he’d been hating himself and trying to figure out some way to break through the stone wall she’d erected.

  Well, they were friends now. They even shared a little bit of a history, and she was glad he’d made that first overture of peace. Now that class was over, she missed talking to him.

  And as the days passed and she worked on her Web page, she also missed Lee. She tried to ignore the unsettling feeling that something was very wrong between them. She told herself that the reason he was a little quiet lately, the reason he seemed to be working outside longer, staying up later, was because he was busy, too. And because he was giving her room and time to work on her project.

  Life was good. Life was very good. She had a new friend in John, and she and Peg made it a point to have lunch together at least once a week. She wasn’t going to let her insecurities, her niggling little suspicion that suggested Lee was pulling away from her, interrupt it.

  It was only her imagination that something was out of place when he seemed sort of thoughtful or pre-occupied. Didn’t he still make love to her with a tenderness that made her weep? She was just imagining that there was desperation when he kissed her—even though she couldn’t stop wondering and worrying about what was going on in his mind.