One More Time

by Deborah Cooke

  • Item the first:

  Leslie’s husband was heading to New Orleans, where his former fiancée lived, and had as much said that he wouldn’t be back.

  • Item the second:

  This would be the same former fiancée who had never married, the one who routinely enclosed personal letters with her Christmas cards to Matt every year, letters which he read over and over again.

  • Item the third:

  This would be the exotic beauty with legs up to her neck, a figure like a Barbie doll and a come-hither manner that made men salivate at forty paces.

  • Item the fourth:

  This would be the same husband with whom Leslie had not had intimate relations in a good three months.

  And four days.

  And twelve hours.

  Leslie licked her lips and braced herself for the last detail.

  • Item the fifth:

  She had no correlating data confirming that Zach was even in New Orleans. Matt’s troublemaking brother had been in Venice, Italy, the last she’d heard and New Orleans wasn’t exactly around the corner from there.

  And if Zach was in trouble in New Orleans, why hadn’t James gone to bail out Zach, as he usually did? It seemed very suspect that Matt would suddenly take on this fraternal responsibility—had that happened before or after he’d learned where Zach was?

  Maybe Leslie shouldn’t have been so gracious about not reading Sharan’s Christmas cards. Maybe she shouldn’t have trusted her husband to have a platonic friendship with a bite-ably sexy and willing woman. Maybe she should have dragged him off to bed and wrapped her tongue around his tonsils, no matter how he had fought her en route. Any which way, he was probably going to be welcomed to the Big Easy with open arms and open thighs and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it now.

  She set the glass down on the hall table with a decisive thump and halfway wished she had dropped it earlier. It would have shattered nicely, seeing as it was lead crystal, and that might have been satisfying.

  It had been a wedding gift, too, so it might have been appropriate to shatter on this day of days.

  “Is Daddy gone?”

  Leslie jumped and turned to find her daughter peering over the banister with what was either hostility or suspicion.

  Maybe both. Welcome to lucky thirteen.

  “Annette.” She smiled as if everything was normal though it took some doing. “Good morning.”

  “Where’s Daddy?”

  “He just left.”

  Annette used an expletive that Leslie would have liked to believe her daughter had never heard before, then fled to her room.

  “Annette! Stop!”

  Annette did not stop. Even taking the stairs three at a time wasn’t enough—her daughter had too much of a head start. Leslie heard the bedroom door slam before she reached the summit, and the key turned in the lock before she even started down the hall.

  Leslie pounded on the door, just because it seemed the thing to do, and it felt remarkably good. “Annette! Annette, open this door.”

  “No.”

  Leslie didn’t like threats or recriminations much, and the severe tone of voice that worked so well on her students had never had any discernible effect upon her daughter.

  So, she took a shaky breath and leaned against the door, rubbing her brow with her fingertips. With an effort, she summoned her usual demeanor, but it was tougher than she ever remembered it being. “Annette? Will you please open the door so we can talk?”

  “I want to see Daddy.”

  She forced herself to sound more patient than she felt. “Well, come and talk to me in the meantime.”

  “No. I want to talk to Daddy, just Daddy.”

  Leslie gritted her teeth, but still managed to keep her voice level. “Your dad has gone to the airport, Annette.”

  “I know. He told me he was going away.”

  That was news. “Didn’t he tell you when he’d be back?”

  “No.”

  At least her daughter didn’t have that morsel of information. “I don’t think he’s sure when he’ll be back,” Leslie said with an assurance she didn’t feel. “You could be waiting for him for a while.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Leslie leaned back against the wall and pinched the bridge of her nose. When she finally spoke, her tone of voice was amazingly cheerful, though it cost her in spades.

  She would keep up appearances, even if it killed her.

  “Fine, then you just wait there as long as you’d like. I’m going to brush my teeth and go to the bathroom and have a muffin for breakfast, then I’m going to have a shower and go to work. You can’t stay here alone all day, so the sooner you come out, the better your chance of getting a muffin yourself.”

  It was a cheap trick, but she was short of options.

  “You wouldn’t eat them all,” Annette whispered, her voice much closer to the door.

  Aha. She had found a nerve.

  “This morning, I just might.” Leslie paused, then twisted the proverbial knife. “They’re chocolate chip, you know, your favorite kind.”

  Then she left her daughter to think about that. She tossed the newspaper in the recycling bin under the sink, determined to tell her daughter about this family tragedy in her own way.

  What exactly that way might be wasn’t clear to Leslie at the moment, but with luck, Annette would fume for a while.

  * * *

  Life, Leslie decided in the midst of her second muffin and her third cup of instant coffee, was apparently a lot like childbirth. Just when you think you can’t stand any more, the universe will demand a bit more. Against all odds, you will be able to accommodate that additional increment of stress, which starts the whole process again. It doesn’t end, at least not soon enough to please the participants.

  There’s always more pain to be borne.

  And somehow, you always manage to take it.

  There was a cheery notion, and one that wasn’t easily accommodated with only instant coffee for consolation. Leslie had labored thirty-seven excruciating hours to bring Annette into the world. Maybe the blessing was that she couldn’t quite remember all (let’s do the math) 2220 minutes—give or take—or every single one of those 133,200 seconds in glorious Technicolor detail any more.

  On the other hand, Leslie could recall an awful lot of them. She drained her mug and considered the dubious merits of another cup of instant java. Even cafeteria coffee promised to be an improvement, which said nothing good about her abilities to boil water and mix it with little brown crystals.

  Maybe there was nowhere to go from here but up.

  Either way, it was definitely a La Perla kind of a day.

  Chapter Two

  There are days when the business traveler should just give it up, hit the bar in the lounge in the airport terminal and wait for his or her luck to change. Matt Coxwell was having one of those days, and given events of the last twenty-four hours—and the quantity of Scotch swimming solo in his belly—was not in any condition to accept his fate amiably.

  His marriage was over. He knew that. He knew that he had compromised all that he could compromise and his father had provided the reminder that it was never going to be enough. Leslie was like his father in that she saw only her own way, saw only what she wanted to see in him.

  Instead of seeing the truth. Funny how people could insist that they loved you when they had no idea who you really were.

  Matt had a dream of his own now, one that would require a lot of him, and one that would accept no compromises. He had to protect it, and thus, he had had to leave. It was that simple.

  It was also remarkably painful. At least he’d had the chance to talk to Annette, though he hadn’t been able to tell her all of the truth. Not yet.

  He owed her the truth, but he owed it to her gently.

  Matt had learned young that marriages only had room for one ambitious partner: it had been his father in his parents’ marriage who had been possessed of
the drive to make his mark. Proof positive of the balance of one with ambition and one with none had come when his mother tired of his father’s rules and that marriage collapsed. It was as if there could be only one person with an agenda, which required one to be support staff. That was the only way that Matt knew marriage worked.

  The problem was that his days as an admin were over. He didn’t expect Leslie to understand that: he expected, in fact, that she would try to persuade him to do it her way again. And he expected that he would weaken—for the sake of Annette, for the sake of stability, for the sake of the affection and admiration he still felt for his wife.

  An abrupt parting was the only possible way to protect his newfound desire.

  There had been no room for negotiation in his parents’ marriage, no chance of compromising his father’s demands. And Leslie had that visionary drive in common with Matt’s father. For eighteen years, Matt had followed her agenda, mostly because he didn’t have one of his own. He knew that the balance of their partnership couldn’t be renegotiated, because that would mean Leslie sacrificing some of her ambition.

  Which just wasn’t possible.

  He wouldn’t ask her to do it, because he couldn’t bear to compel her to deny him his dream. It had all made perfect sense, until he hadn’t been able to resist one last kiss—and she’d responded in spades. There had been a time when they had always kissed like that, though it hadn’t been lately.

  Where had that come from? Why had she kissed him like that? Why now? He could taste her on his lips and the taste didn’t fade. He couldn’t remember when they’d last had sex, but he could swear she would have done it in the foyer this morning.

  And that was a pretty distracting idea. How could she so easily undermine his conviction in what he knew to be true? Or was it all a game, to keep him doing what she wanted?

  Matt didn’t know and that troubled him.

  It turned out that he had to connect through Chicago to get to New Orleans, on account of booking late. It wasn’t that hard to believe that a lot of people wanted to leave Boston for sunnier climes in January, but a four-hour layover in O’Hare (also in January) wasn’t something to anticipate with enthusiasm. And at this particular moment, Matt was singularly devoid of enthusiasm.

  “Couldn’t you just route me through Seattle instead?” he asked the ticketing agent, who hadn’t been very amiable, however friendly the skies might prove to be. “Or maybe Osaka?”

  She clearly didn’t think he was funny. Matt could tell by the way she slapped his boarding pass onto the counter between them.

  “Look at the bright side, sir,” she said sweetly. “You’ll accumulate more frequent flier miles this way.”

  “And, if traffic is stacked up in Chicago the way it usually is, four hours might just allow me to make my connection.”

  “Have a nice flight, sir,” she said with narrowed eyes and a tone that implied she wished his plane bounced through air pockets all the way to Chicago. “Next!”

  He had a good two hours until his departure, so Matt could at least hope for a restorative Scotch before boarding. The haze induced by his binge was beginning to lift, and the danger in sobering up was that he might start to think.

  That could only be bad news—there was one thing that he really didn’t want to remember and another he didn’t want to think about—so the best course of action was obviously to remain drunk for as long as possible.

  Matt, however, had forgotten about the new security protocol. It had been years since he had flown anywhere, after all. His bag had to be X-rayed, his laptop started up to prove that it wasn’t full of plastic explosives, ditto his Blackberry and cell phone. His shoes had to be X-rayed, which left him standing on the cold tile floor in his stocking feet along with everyone else intending to get on a flight this morning.

  A decade-plus of child care left Matt wondering how many of his fellow passengers had Planter’s warts or a toenail fungus or some other podalic virus that this security strategy would give them the opportunity to share.

  It also made him remember 9/11, not just the devastation of that day but his own dawning sense that if he had been among those lost that day, he would have wasted his life. 9/11 had made Matt realize that he didn’t even know what his dream was. It had started him on a furtive quest, a quest that had brought him to this time and this place, a man with ambition and a goal and a clearer sense of his own direction than he’d ever had in his life.

  It had also left him with his guts ripped out and strewn all around him, but on some level, he knew he was heading in the right direction.

  At least if his number came up on this day, he’d know that he hadn’t wasted his life so far.

  And that had to count for something.

  * * *

  Who says no one wears armor anymore? Not Leslie Coxwell. Lingerie—silk and wires and elastic—gave her the stamina to face even an auditorium of bored undergraduates. It was armor, hidden armor, that bolstered her confidence, lifting and separating all the while.

  And let’s face it: there’s nothing like an underwire bra with a frothy lace edging and matching panties to put a bounce in any woman’s step. Leslie had always loved lingerie, the furthest from white cotton and sensible the better, and long ago had made a bargain with herself.

  If she could tame the dragon known as Slow Metabolism and keep herself from looking like a zeppelin in jeans, then she would buy herself all the lingerie she desired.

  And that had proven to be a lot.

  She’d worked all through university to support her habit, probably the only time that she had sacrificed anything to the pursuit of better grades. Her dresser drawers—pun intended—overflowed with bras and panties, garter belts and camisoles, slips and teddies, tap pants, tanks and corsets. She had matched sets in red and pink and orange and yellow and jade and blue, and lots in black.

  Matt had always preferred the black.

  There were flower prints and stripes, polka dots and swirls, paisleys and jacquards. Leslie had a veritable cornucopia of satin and velvet and lace and silk jammed into every corner of the closet, and it wasn’t enough.

  It could never be enough.

  On better days, she could admit that she had a bona fide addiction.

  But it was a pretty harmless one.

  French lingerie, American lingerie, Italian, and Brazilian—you could tour the world and make a lot of conclusions about a whole lot of people just by doing a label tour of Leslie’s collection. Some had eyelet trim, some had beading, some had ribbon roses or just plain ribbons. She had carefully cultivated a cross-selection of every kind of lace known to womankind, in more delicious colors than you’ll find in an ice cream shop.

  There was always one more that she needed, one more that captured her heart, and no trip to a lingerie store (or a department store, for that matter) left Leslie empty-handed.

  If this was a disease, she’d decided long ago that she’d happily die of it.

  The best part about it, in Leslie’s opinion, was that no one in the big wide world had a clue. She might have a passing resemblance to a lingerie model in her underwear, but once she was dressed, she was Marian the Librarian all the way.

  She wore her long dark hair wound up in a demure knot, her twin sets were as modest and sensible as her shoes and plain straight skirts. Leslie’s wire-framed glasses made her look as wildly passionate as a loaf of Wonder Bread. Dressed for work, she was ageless and virtually genderless—which was a feat, given the drop-dead glamor of her hidden balcony bra.

  There had been a time when she had worried about what would ensue if she ever had a car accident, but that terror had passed. Leslie was too good of a driver to worry much about that—if she had an accident, it would be horrific and she would die. A tanker trailer would have to explode in front of her or something similar.

  Which meant that explaining her addiction would be somebody else’s problem, if indeed, the underwear survived the inferno.

  On this morning, fa
ced with challenges above and beyond expectation, it was clear to Leslie that the new La Perla set had come into her life for a reason. She’d been saving it for something special, and this day was going to be it. The fact that she had found it, discounted, in her size, was as clear a mark of divine intervention as any woman could need.

  On this day, she was going to need all the support she could get.

  La Perla, for those unaware of the splendors of intimate apparel, is the Everest of lingerie. Italian-designed, Italian-made, hand-finished, made of exquisite materials, priced as if the goddesses themselves are the company’s best clients, it is the best of the best.

  Which is saying something.

  This particular combination was smoky purple, though it might look silvery in some light. It was made of pure silk, woven in satin—Leslie’s favorite—and trimmed with a substantial border of lace that had been dyed to match the silk.

  The lace trim was about three inches deep and shaped like overlapping leaves: it followed the curve of Leslie’s breasts, the lavish V lushly framing her modest décolletage. That lace would have looked divine peeking out the neck of a sweater cut low, if Leslie had possessed such a garment or been inclined to wear one. The lace also accentuated the leg line of the panties, which were cut high to make her legs look longer and slimmer.

  It was a shame that no one would see her like this, at least not in the foreseeable future. The plunging line of the bra reminded her of the night she had revealed her secret to Matt—that had been a black satin underwire bra, if memory served—and she blushed in mingled recollection and desire.

  (Desire for Matt, in case you aren’t sure. She still had the bra in the bottom right drawer and it still fit.)

  Leslie pulled on a dove gray turtleneck with short sleeves with curt gestures, concealing that Italian silken marvel from those unworthy of seeing it. She checked, but there was nary a lump or a ripple to reveal her hidden glory. The black straight wool skirt, the sensible Hush Puppy loafers, the cardigan that matched the turtleneck, all combined to give her a serious and reliable air. No one would be surprised to learn that she was an academic, not when she was dressed like this. Pearl stud earrings were her only jewelry, along with her watch and wedding rings.