“So, tell me.”
I stared into my coffee and shrugged. “Nothing to tell.”
Mercy laughed softly. “Come on, Jane. You’re miserable.”
“I’m fine.” Fine as a woman could be considering she’d made a mess of the most intense and frankly wonderful relationship she’d ever had with a man.
“You and Mathias hooked up.” She broke open her muffin and offered me half. “Don’t deny it. It was written all over both of you yesterday. The man has a serious thing for you.”
“I don’t get physically or emotionally involved with strangers.” I frowned at her for good measure. But I knew already that it was a lost cause.
“Oh yeah?” She snorted. “What’s Charlie’s favorite color? What did he want to be when he was six years old? His favorite subject in school?”
I couldn’t have even guessed the answers to those questions. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Sure it does. You’ve been seeing him casually for nearly a year and you’ve never even spent the night with him. I know for a fact he’s only been in your apartment like six times total, and he’s barely gotten past the living room.”
Okay, so what did that mean? I liked things to be neat, and spending the night with a man made things messy. Look what a mess I’d made with Mathias. “There is nothing wrong with that.”
“No. Of course not. A woman can choose exactly how involved she wants to be with a man, and no one has the right to decide if it’s right or wrong.” Mercy sat back in the booth we were sharing and glanced around the cafe. “Yet if we put all that aside I can count on one hand the number of times that you’ve called me at 9 P.M. on a work night for something. You sounded like a nervous wreck on the phone. Otherwise I can assure you I’d be wrapped up in my man right now.”
“Is it weird?”
“What?”
“Having a man in your life like Shamus. Don’t you miss the freedom?”
“I’m not the man’s slave.” Mercy snorted. “We have a relationship, Jane, and it’s not one sided. We both sacrifice things to be together, and at the end of the day knowing that I can go to him and not have to worry about anything else is priceless to me. I don’t know what I feared about falling in love. If I’d known it would make me feel so complete I wouldn’t have backed away from Shame once.”
“And marriage?”
“Marriage.” Mercy sighed. “It’s a social obligation of a sort, isn’t it? People expect it, sometimes even demand it if you want to be respected.”
“Children?”
She paused and cleared her throat. “Lord, this man’s got you thinking too much.”
“I’m being real.”
“Okay.” She cleared her throat and nodded. “I think about children lately, in a way that I never did before. A baby is the ultimate commitment, ya know? Of course I’ve thought about having Shame’s baby, and when I do, it won’t scare me. I know he’ll be there. I know he’ll love our baby without reservation or stipulation…just the way he does me.”
“No stipulations?” I shook my head. “Your relationship is full of stipulations.”
“Name one.”
“It isn’t like you can still date.”
“Well, that’s hardly a sacrifice. I haven’t looked at another man like that since I met Shame.” She shrugged.
“Not once?”
“No, and worrying about the grass on the other side of the fence is a waste of time.”
“I’m just not ready for anything serious.”
“And you think Mathias is the kind of man who’d want it?” Mercy asked softly.
“I never said I was involved with him.” Damn it.
“Come on. I’m your friend, right?” Mercy tilted her head and raised an eyebrow.
“You’re also my boss.” I sat back in the booth and crossed my arms over my breasts. “How would you feel if you discovered I was fucking a man who could potentially be in charge of protecting Holman’s multimillion-dollar collection?”
She pursed her lips. “Your private life has nothing to do with the gallery.”
“That’s crap and you know it.”
“Look, Jane, hiding behind your job is a fool’s choice. Life is about chance, and if you never take any—well, then you’re wasting your life.” She slid from the booth, her hands shaking as she gathered her purse and coat.
“Mercy, I’m not criticizing you for getting involved with Shamus. This is about me.” I swallowed hard and slid across the booth to stand.
“I involved myself intimately with a contracted artist. Shame’s contract is worth twenty million dollars, Jane. Don’t think I didn’t think about what would happen to me if things hadn’t gone well with Shame and he’d pulled his work from the gallery.” She pulled her jacket on and met my gaze. “But I couldn’t let that stand in the way, and I hope that you don’t either. There are some risks worth taking.”
I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans as she hugged me and hurried from the cafe. Fuck and double fuck. I slid back into the booth and buried my face in my hands. I just plain sucked in the personal relationship department.
“Would you like something else?”
I jerked and then glanced up at the waitress. “No, just the check please.”
“Of course.”
I pulled a towel free of the free-standing weight station and rubbed my face with it. Forty-five minutes of weight training and thirty on a treadmill hadn’t come close to taking the edge off. Messing up with a man was one thing, but fucking up my friendship with Mercy because of my own hang-ups had me feeling like absolute shit.
Truth be known, I was of the opinion that a man can be replaced but finding a real friend who’ll stand by you is priceless. The thought that I might have hurt her feelings had me feeling about two feet tall.
Disgruntled, I grabbed my keys and went back up to my apartment. My empty apartment. Its empty status had always been something of a relief, but not now. I blamed Mathias. He made me think about things that I’d never thought before.
The light was on when I entered the foyer. For a few seconds my heart jumped a little, and then I remembered that Mathias hadn’t kept the key he’d used over the weekend. Frowning, I tossed my keys on the table and walked into the living room. Mercy was curled up on one end of my couch with her handheld.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” She poked at her screen for a few seconds and then put away the stylus. “I decided that we weren’t finished talking.”
I laughed a little and plopped down in a chair. “I gave you a key to my apartment?”
“Yeah. Did you forget?”
“Apparently.” I pulled my legs up into the chair and jerked off my shoes. “Okay, so what’s left to talk about?”
“I got all tangled up in my own situation and lost sight of yours.” She dropped her handheld into her purse and focused on me. “That wasn’t fair of me.”
“I really wasn’t talking about you and Shamus.” I bit down on my lip and considered what to say next. “In fact, I think your relationship with him is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to you. I’ve never seen you happier.”
“I know, and I was silly for being so sensitive about it.” She looked me over as if she’d just realized what I was wearing. “You’ve been working out?”
I laughed at her wrinkled nose. “Yeah, we aren’t all blessed with a curvy figure like yours. And bony with sagging skin isn’t sexy. I’d give up multiple orgasms for big, natural tits.”
“Are you smoking crack?” She laughed. “Big, natural tits cause back problems and grooves in my shoulders, and men rarely look me in the eye when they talk.”
“At least they aren’t staring at your chest trying to figure out where your tits are.” I sighed. “Man, it would be nice.”
“Besides, don’t go giving up the best thing God gave us. Multiple orgasms are probably the most important thing we have.”
“Yeah.”
“And you can bu
y breasts,” she pointed out sagely, “that won’t sag like natural ones. And I know you are purposely trying to avoid talking about what is bugging you.”
“No, I’m not. Small tits bother me a lot.” I sighed and laughed when she frowned at me. “What’s it mean when a man tells you that he doesn’t want to share?”
“No real man wants to share his woman.”
“Who said I wanted to be some man’s woman?” Though it didn’t sound so bad the way she said it. “Why can’t all men just be simple and easy to deal with? There are plenty of men who would be content to fuck me whenever I want and leave me alone the rest of the time.”
“Would you want to share him?”
The thought of him fucking another woman made me want to go get my gun. “I’m not the one making demands.”
“There are plenty of women who would love to find a man who turns them on and wants to see only them. How often do you even run across a man that actually makes your panties wet?”
It’d been awhile. At least until Mathias had tossed me on the floor and climbed on top of me. I’d wanted him in those first few seconds, and that hadn’t changed at all.
“He’s beautiful.” I finally said, my voice breaking a little. I winced at that but looked toward her with dry eyes.
Mercy chuckled. “Yes.”
“And a sex god.”
“What a bonus! Don’t you hate getting a pretty man who can’t fuck?” She grinned when I laughed. “I’m for real.”
Nodding, I stood from my chair. “Want a beer?”
“Yeah, Shame drove me over. He’ll come get me when I’m ready to come home.” Mercy followed me into the kitchen for the beer.
“Remember that guy Nigel that I dated?”
“Yeah, pretty face, great English accent…” She sighed and waved her hand.
“And he couldn’t fuck his way out of a wet paper sack,” I finished as I went to find a bottle opener. I popped her cap and passed her the beer. “Well, hell, since denying it has done me no good—I’ll just fess up.” I sat down at the kitchen table. “Mathias spent the weekend here.”
“Oh.” She sat down across from me. “Well, that’s not what I expected to hear.”
“What did you expect?”
“That you had sex with him and sent him packing.”
“He spent the weekend in my bed doing things to me that I’ve only read in erotic romance novels. I don’t have a single patch of skin on my body that hasn’t been fully explored by the man.”
“And?”
And it had been the most amazing sexual experience of my life. It was the kind of sex I could imagine having for the next thirty or forty years, and thinking like that had me wishing I had a therapist to moan and groan to. I sighed. “And when I told him that sex was the only thing on my agenda—he got mad and left.”
“And today?”
“And today I was trying to ignore it all happened, and he made it difficult. So difficult that when I left work I went over to his hotel room; we had some really hot, amazing sex; and then we argued again. Then I called you to whine, came home, worked out, and now it’s 1:00 A.M. and we have to be at work in six hours.” I took a deep swallow of beer. “The man has me at my wit’s end.”
“He wants to see you exclusively.”
“Yeah, while we explore this thing between us.” I motioned my hand around. “It’s all about that risk stuff you were mentioning earlier.”
“But you don’t want that?” she asked softly.
I could see the confusion in her eyes. More women than I could count would give up their best Prada handbag for a man to be interested in them the way Mathias was interested in me. “Is that slutty?”
“No. It’s certainly par for your course, but I wouldn’t say slutty.” She fiddled with her beer bottle and met my gaze.
“Par for my course?”
“Remember how I used to always date nerds?”
“Yeah.”
“I dated them because I wasn’t attracted to them. I didn’t want to deal with sex so I avoided it.”
“Okay.” I nodded, suddenly a little more empty. Mercy had survived so much and learned to love again. It seemed possible that I could too, but why was I so afraid of it?
“The way I see it, you keep a man waiting in the wings so you don’t have to deal with taking someone seriously. If you didn’t have Charlie, there would be someone else there and he would be just as boring. Attractive, good in bed, but not someone you have to talk to every day.” She took a deep breath and then a drink from her beer. “It’s your pattern.”
Since it was my pattern, I couldn’t very well be very angry with her. Instead, I just sat there and considered what to say. “So I use men like Charlie to keep myself safe from what?”
“Love. You and I both know that you are in no danger of falling in love with Charlie or any man like him.”
“Love hurts.”
“Yeah, but it’s also pretty damn cool.”
“Love ends with commitment or heartache.”
“Yeah, but life would be boring as hell without it.” She laughed. “Don’t look at me that way, I mean it.”
I dropped my gaze to the table between us, because I figured I wasn’t capable of not glaring at her. “I don’t have room for a man who is serious.”
“Okay, then tell him and he’ll move on.”
He’ll move on. “Even thinking about him moving on makes me want to crawl into my bed for a few years and moan.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “This shouldn’t be so damned complicated. I like the man. I enjoy being intimate with him. He’s fun to hang out with.”
“Then telling Charlie to hit the road should be a walk in the park.”
“It isn’t about Charlie.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s about me. I promised myself a very long time ago that I would never let a man maneuver me into making decisions that I don’t want to make. That’s how my mother ended up trapped in a marriage she didn’t want with three kids. She destroyed our family because she didn’t have enough strength to acknowledge even to herself that she never wanted a family to begin with. My father ate his own fucking gun because she broke his heart.”
Mercy cleared her throat. “And you don’t want to be your mother.”
“No. Not in a million years.” I bit down on my lip. I couldn’t remember ever discussing my mother with Mercy. “I see her twice a year, you know. And never once in all the times that we’ve met up for a weekend together or whatever have I ever asked her why she left.”
“Are you afraid of the answer?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I pursed my lips together. “She came to the hospital once after the shooting. I know she meant well, but after about an hour of her hovering, I exploded. She hadn’t bothered to be there for me before and it was infuriating that she wanted to be there then. I didn’t try to contact her for a year after that.”
“Was it difficult?”
“Stella is pretty damn good at playing the victim. I felt guilty for a long time about how I treated her, but it only served to remind me of my own anger and hurt. I also realized that I blamed her for my father’s suicide. She might as well have put that gun to his head herself.” I cleared my throat. “My older brother, Stan, refused to let her attend his funeral. I guess I’m not the only one who blamed her.”
“Jane, you don’t honestly think you are anything like that selfish woman, do you?”
I met her gaze and shrugged. “I could be.”
“You are anything but selfish, and I’ve never known you to break a single promise.”
“I try to be as honest as I can be.” I took a deep drag of my beer and shrugged. “But I’ve never been faced with the kind of choices that my mother had to make.”
“Do you think about having children?”
Wow. I sighed and then finally nodded. “Yeah, I mean, I’m in my thirties so my clock is thumping along just the way it’s supposed to
. I have the urges, and I think I’d probably be a pretty good mom.”
“And?”
“And, maybe sometime in the future I could see myself having a family. I’m just not sure at this point, and now there is this man in my life expecting me to make choices and changes based on what he wants. Well, I’m way past living to please a man.” I put the beer bottle down on the table with a thud and nodded to myself since she was staring at the table between us.
Deanna Lee Page 11