One More Time

by Deborah Cooke

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, but if I hate you in the morning, I’ll let you know.” She grinned then, but her eyes were suspiciously bright. “Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, before she turned her back on him, swearing under her breath. He poured himself another shot of tequila, then the screen door slammed again.

  * * *

  It was late when Leslie got to bed. She was dead on her feet after her day, but still anxious. In fact, the yearning that filled her had a certain familiarity.

  Leslie sighed that she’d have to solve it herself and reached into the top drawer of her nightstand. When her fingers didn’t immediately fall on her vibrator, she leaned over to search for it. It must have slipped under something else, she was sure of it, but as she rummaged through the drawer, it became obvious that the vibrator wasn’t there.

  Someone had filched it.

  And Leslie would have bet good money that neither Beverly nor “the girls” were the responsible party.

  Was Annette sprawled across her bed, murmuring Scott Sexton’s name in this very moment? Had she washed the vibrator first? How did the stuffed puppy figure into all of this?

  Did Leslie even want to know?

  Hello, puberty.

  There was a scary prospect. Leslie stared at the ceiling, eyes wide open, for longer than she could have anticipated just five minutes before.

  Chapter Ten

  Matt awakened in the sweet perfume of a New Orleans morning, a heady mix of oleander, jasmine, and coffee with chicory. The sun poked its fingers through the parted curtains to jab him in the eye. He got up to close the drapes and saw the sun just on the horizon, hanging low and red.

  As red as blood.

  With little pink clouds scattered across the sky.

  He pivoted and headed for the kitchen, moving quietly past Sharan’s closed bedroom door, still shaking his head over her early-morning return and assertion that Blake was here for a good time, not a long time. The guy had been pretty surprised to find Matt here and Matt could understand Blake’s confusion. He poured himself an orange juice and gave it a dollop of dark rum to take the edge off his morning.

  Then he rubbed his forehead, wincing at the pain there, and tossed back the pair of aspirin that were becoming part of his morning regimen. Tequila, he decided, was not a substance with which a man could have an enduring relationship. Banished to the veranda the night before when Sharan came home with her date, he’d taken the bottle of tequila for company and now regretted it.

  Maybe he should have just left.

  Maybe he would have done so if he hadn’t sensed Sharan’s loneliness, or her fear.

  Sharan’s bedroom was adjacent to the kitchen and the house was small, so when her mattress began to squeak, Matt felt too close for comfort. He grabbed a shirt and a pair of shorts and retreated to the veranda again.

  There was a nice breeze coming off the river, and the vine beside the porch hid him from view which suited him pretty well. He sat and drank his O.J. and tried not to look at the crimson eye of the sun.

  Tried not to think about little bits on the bookcase behind what had remained of his father. Had they been his father’s brains? It seemed reasonable that they might be.

  He gulped orange juice and desperately tried to think of something else that was the same red as the sun, something with a more soothing connotation.

  The inside of Annette’s mouth, when she had wailed as a baby, often all night long. He’d learned more about the look of her tonsils that first year than he’d ever cared to know.

  No. He needed to think of something that wasn’t human tissue.

  Red had been the color of the sweatshirt Leslie had stolen from him on their third date, the one that she had worn for the next five years, until it had fallen to shreds. Matt smiled into his juice, hearing her consistent protest that she hadn’t technically stolen it because he hadn’t ever asked for it back.

  Which had been true. She’d worn that sweatshirt every time she’d studied, for luck she’d said, and he still liked the idea that he could be her lucky charm.

  Even if he wasn’t anymore. Matt frowned and drained his glass, setting it aside, letting his thoughts slide into the past.

  It had been April, chilly, almost their anniversary and nearly time for Leslie to defend her master’s thesis.

  She studied every afternoon and every night. He was working in real estate law under a genial little lawyer who professed himself glad to have another pair of feet. Matt spent days researching titles, and if truth be told, getting distracted by all the strange details that hung on deeds for old property like cobwebs on an antique lamp.

  “No goats.” Admonitions against keeping livestock, chickens or pigeons were common, almost as common as liens against the property that had to be paid back first in the event of a sale.

  “Buyer shall not sell said home and property for less than $2000.” Price protection was common too, though it was laughable to think of the smallest possible piece of dirt in Boston going for less than two thousand dollars.

  “Buyer shall never sell said property to the Goodman family of Davis Lane, or otherwise facilitate the passage of said property into the possession of said family.” These kinds of edicts always left Matt wondering what had happened between the two families, whether the Goodman clan were even interested in said property or whether it was a fiction in the seller’s mind.

  You could put anything in a property title, he’d learned that pretty quickly, but still he had been fascinated by the kinds of things that people did put in titles. He had sensed then that you could learn a lot about human nature by reading these seemingly innocuous documents.

  Which is what he supposed Leslie was doing, with all of her tax rolls and hearth censuses and lists of fines payable to the courts of the lord of such-and-such. He’d understood then the fascination she felt for the way people unwittingly revealed their natures, desires, and secrets.

  Red was the color of the sweatshirt she’d been wearing the night he’d come home to find her lost in her books.

  Red was also the color of the element on the stove, the element beneath the empty pot.

  The apartment was full of steam, the pot on the stove boiled dry, the package of pasta open on the counter.

  “Hey! Don’t burn the place down!” Matt darted to move the pot, turn off the burner, before things got serious.

  “Ohmigod, I forgot the pot!” The horrified look on Leslie’s face revealed that she’d been somewhere else completely—maybe the thirteenth century. “I was going to make dinner, so it would be ready when you came home.”

  Red was the color of his wife’s cheeks.

  Crisis resolved, the pot sizzling in the sink and the burner turned off, Matt kissed her. It was a good kiss, sweet and hot, the way kisses were every night when he came home.

  “You don’t come back to the twentieth century until I get here, do you?” he teased finally and she blushed.

  “It’s hardly worth it, if you’re not here.” Her eyes were clear when she said this, sparkling a little with that honesty he so loved, and he caught his breath.

  “You can’t mean that.”

  “I do.” She smiled and shrugged, shaking her head as she looked over her books. “I was clearing the table for dinner, putting my books away, and I noticed this footnote that I missed earlier.” She pounced on a book, beginning to read the footnote to him.

  Matt laughed. “Can you tell me after we eat? I’m starving.”

  “Sorry. I just forget.”

  “I know.” They smiled at each other, smitten newlyweds still. Matt hadn’t yet gotten used to the fact that marriage could be this way, filled with laughter instead of the silence that had always yawned between his parents in his recollection.

  He wasn’t exactly sure how his parents had managed to conceive a second son—himself—let alone two more children after that, but he supposed it had been a quiet matter.
>
  Dutybound, maybe, which was a horrible thought.

  He shed his jacket then, because it was warm in the apartment no matter what the season, and rolled up his sleeves. “So, how about I cook?”

  Leslie glanced up, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Can you cook?”

  “A bit. I’ll learn more.”

  She laughed, a rich sound that always made him smile, too. “You mean it can’t be worse than what I make.”

  “I don’t mean that at all. You’re just so focused. I respect that.”

  “I have to be if I’m going to defend this thesis well.” She shook her head. “Why did I take the thesis option instead of the course-based masters?”

  “Because it would be harder, and because you knew you could do it.” He bent and kissed her just below her ear, liking how she shivered. “And because you knew that it was the right step to take towards getting into the grad school you want.”

  “You make me sound very deliberate.”

  “That’s not a bad thing. You’re driven. You’re passionate about what you do. I admire that.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No.” Matt laughed. “I’ve never had a burning desire to do anything, not the way you are with your medieval studies. You’re going to be a great teacher, because you’re going to bring all that passion to your work.” He shrugged and glanced around the apartment as if seeking an answer in its corners. “I just get pushed this way and that, and kind of drift along.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself. Not everyone gets into law school, you know, and not everyone passes the Bar exam.”

  Matt saw that he’d never be able to explain to her how they were different from each other, much less the reason why he admired her so much. And it was okay. It was enough that he did. “So, one thing I know how to cook is a fettuccine alla carbonara.”

  She looked up in shock. “You know how to cook something that doesn’t even have a name in English?”

  “It’s pasta, with a little cheese sauce and some bacon, some peas. It’s not complicated. Really.”

  Leslie bowed and stepped out of the minuscule kitchen, waving him into it with a flourish. “Then, by all means, be my guest. Do you want me to make salad?”

  “No, I’ll do it. Don’t let ol’ Bernie get lonely.”

  Leslie laughed, then gazed at Matt with undisguised admiration, such a sparkle in her eyes that he hoped like hell he could remember the recipe.

  And that they had all of the ingredients.

  So, Matt had embarked on the culinary adventure that had lasted all of his life so far. Filled with anticipation and ideas, he had climbed that long narrow staircase every night with a bag of groceries, rain or shine, and set to work.

  Sometimes it worked out well. Sometimes he bombed. Leslie ate it all and gave her compliments to the chef every time.

  And she never made a tacky suggestion that she was dessert.

  Ultimately, he saw that there had never been a question of one of them learning to cook: the delicious smells rising from the Portuguese restaurant below their apartment had left Matt salivating every hour that he was home. The choices were cook or spend every spare dime they had—there weren’t many of those—on take-out food. For the sake of sheer quantities involved, home cooking was the way to go.

  In the here and now of New Orleans, Matt yearned for one of those “good to see you again” kisses, kisses that had disappeared when they had started to take each other for granted. Maybe he yearned for the past. Maybe he yearned for appreciation.

  Maybe he yearned what he should have known better than to want.

  Leslie had always known what she wanted, where she was going to go and exactly how she was going to get there. The path ahead was straight and clear for her. That vision had always awed Matt and in a way he envied it. It was completely alien to his own sense of floating through life, waiting for something to seize his attention and hold fast.

  But nothing ever had. Not until Leslie, though that was different. A man couldn’t just spend his whole life being in love—well, he could, but Matt needed to do something else, too. For lack of a more commanding option, it had been easy for Matt to choose to be a stay-at-home dad, the better to facilitate Leslie’s return to the work she loved. He had had a home office until two years ago, practiced real estate law on his own schedule, picked Annette up from this and that class, made dinner every night.

  But something had changed in the last two years. Something good had come out of this experience with his father: something had awakened that had been dormant all of Matt’s life.

  He had started to write.

  He had done so furtively at first, in stolen moments, on filched sheets of paper. The characters and the story had seized hold of his imagination in a way he had never experienced before he recognized the passion: he had witnessed it in Leslie.

  In fact, he might have run from it, if he hadn’t seen how she worked with her passion, corralled it and channeled it and guided it to where she wanted to go. She had a strong hand on the reins: Matt was far from having that, but just seeing it done allowed him to believe it was possible.

  Finally, something had grabbed him tightly and refused to let go. He was afraid of the writing, afraid of its power over his imagination, afraid of the potent truths it revealed, afraid that the two competitive brothers in his fictional story were just thinly veiled versions of himself and James.

  Mostly he was afraid that he had put everything he had into this book’s creation and that the result might not be any good. What would that say about him?

  In contrast, Leslie didn’t have doubts. Leslie was resolute and strong, and she was pragmatic. On some level, Matt admitted to his juice glass, he was afraid that she wouldn’t respect the one thing he’d chosen to do, the one thing that had commandeered his passion.

  He was changing the rules, needing space and time and encouragement for himself. He knew better than to ask her for what he needed. Leslie saw her own way to the exclusion of all else.

  It was what he loved about her. It was also what made him believe it was impossible for them to remain together.

  But he’d missed his kitchen last night, his familiar tools in their familiar places, the butcher he could count on to trim the fat just right—that was how he’d ended up with fish—the greengrocer who held a little of the best produce in the back of the store for Matt.

  But mostly he’d missed that moment, the moment he waited for every day and didn’t even realize he waited for, the moment when Leslie walked through the front door and, unbeknownst to herself, her expression changed completely. She often arrived home harried or late, her brow furrowed and loads of books in her arms, some explanation or apology falling from her lips. But when she crossed the threshold and caught the scent of dinner, her whole face softened in a way that broke Matt’s heart.

  Was it relief? Was it love? Was it just pleasure? He’d never asked her to name her response. He liked that she didn’t even realize that she did it, that she let her guard down because she was home. There was that moment when the look in her eyes made him believe that she still was as surprised as ever to find him there.

  And glad he was.

  The glimpse was enough, because she always smiled right afterward and said: “something smells good”. It might be a fleeting smile, it might soon be eased away by the cares of her day or the demands of their daughter, the words might be rote, but for one precious moment every day, Leslie always looked at Matt with eyes alight.

  Just the way she had, once upon a time, in a tiny apartment over Inman Square when he had first offered to cook fettuccine alla carbonara.

  The sun broke clear of the horizon then, fiercely red. Matt knew with utter conviction that there was only one person he wanted to talk to right now.

  Just one more time.

  * * *

  The phone rang at 7:45 Friday morning, just as Leslie was entering that never-never land between dream and wake. Except she hadn’t dreamed the night be
fore.

  Was that an omen? There was no time to think about it with the insistent shrill of the phone right beside her.

  She reached for the receiver, fearing the worst. “Hello?”

  “Good morning,” Matt murmured into her ear. “Sleep well?”

  It was what he had murmured into her ear a thousand times at this point in the morning. Leslie closed her eyes, easily remembering how that question was followed by a smooth caress, how it usually led to early lovemaking.

  At least once upon a time it had. Her eyes popped open again, and she reminded herself not to be so easily seduced.

  Matt might have guessed that the mood was less than he’d hoped for, because he kept talking, instead of waiting for her to reply. “I was thinking about that first apartment we had. Remember the one off Inman Square?”

  “What a dump. The rent was outrageous for what we got.”

  “How can you say that?” She could hear the undercurrent of laughter in his voice. “The place had character…”

  Leslie snorted. “That’s real estate lingo for ‘dump’.”

  “I still have bumps on my head from that angled ceiling in the bathroom.”

  “And I can still smell the caldo verde soup from the restaurant downstairs. Kale and potato, day and night, day after day after day.”

  “Never mind the cockroaches that came visiting from their kitchen.”

  Leslie shuddered even as she smiled. “Don’t remind me!”

  “It was our place, though, our refuge from the world.” Matt’s voice dropped low, low enough to give her goose pimples. “Remember?”

  Dear God, but she remembered. She remembered silent lovemaking, their eyes filled with stars, and showers together and stifling their laughter so that no one would hear them through the paper-thin walls. She remembered the smell of that restaurant permeating everything; she remembered Matt being the focus of her universe. She remembered how they were lost in each other and the lump that rose in her throat made it impossible to catch her breath. The telephone line seemed to resonate with emotion.