He winced and fell back in bed. “No.”
She thought to carry on, now that she had wandered into the deep end. “I think you have suppressed anger issues.” After dealing with her sister, understanding the ins and outs of the human condition, such as it was, she had learned to spot the signs.
“I don’t.”
“It’s because of her, isn’t it? You can’t forgive her. Not that I can blame you, but it still eats at you.”
He propped back up on his elbow. “Don’t analyze me.”
Obviously David didn’t take to psychobabble as easily as Val. Still, Ashley was curious about his marriage, the marriage he didn’t want to talk about, and curious about the bitch. Ashley couldn’t help her feelings. Whoever had worked over David, well, the word bitch fit, and Ashley was nothing if not accurate.
“I don’t want you to hurt,” she told him, and the deep truth in those words surprised her. She didn’t like him locked-jawed and locked-mind. She understood that sometimes he needed to be that way, but she didn’t have to like it.
He leaned closer, and the locked jaw disappeared. She reached up a hand to tame his hair, and inadvertently her body curved into his.
“You’re too soft, Ashley Larsen.” David looked at her, then looked away, staring intently at the same wall that Ashley had studied only hours before. Sometimes studying a wall was easier than studying the mess of your own life.
“I’m sorry she hurt you,” she said, pressing a kiss over his heart, her fingers tracing initials there. Her initials.
David caught her hand. “Are you trying to heal me with the magic sex energy?”
So, he wanted to make a joke now? At least he wasn’t looking at the wall anymore. Okay, she’d wait. “Very perceptive. My vagina is a powerful thing—full of ancient medicine.”
At that, David moved over her, pushed deep inside her, and his eyes locked with hers. Her breathing changed, slowed, and her hands clutched at his back to hold him there. This time, there was no frantic coupling, no pounding rain, no mundane chatter, no jokes. There was only this unshakable thread between them. An odd connection that she once believed must be the pull of hormones, and the feel of his thick cock filling her. Ashley had assumed that this void that he filled was the one between her legs. She was wrong.
The void he filled was the one in her heart.
All her life, especially when reading fairy tales, she had believed in love the old-fashioned way—you had to earn it. But this felt like a gift. Some shimmering chalice that the gods had handed her on a misguided whim. All she had to do was drink from it. All she had to do was swallow the taste of this. All she had to do was accept the gift that she had been given.
Without hesitation, David knotted their fingers together like pieces of a puzzle locking into place. Each time he pushed deeper, she rose up to follow without question. There was no choice, not here, not now. Later, she would think. Right now, slow pleasure built inside her, each wave of sensation larger than before, growing outward, farther, seeping into places far removed from the apex of her thighs. It was so much easier when it was nothing but lust, but now her feelings were muddled, woven into a knot that she had no desire to untangle. Not now.
This man, the one who overturned the world without thinking twice, pulled at her.
The candles hissed, their glow falling to dark. His seductive mouth grazed her lips, her neck, and she gasped at each gentle touch. A trail of unshakable dreams followed in the wake of his kiss, a trail of purposeful hunger followed in the wake of each insistent thrust.
“Ashley,” he whispered, and her heart skittered in fear.
He wanted to ruin this perfection. Words, once said, could never be unsaid. Deeds, once done, could never be undone. Ashley loved this drive within him, the need to push harder and higher, but not here. Not yet. She wanted to drink it in, sip at the taste. But to think about it, worry about it, was to ruin it.
Fears could be conquered, not easily, but it could be done. Worries could be dismissed, put off for another day. But loyalties and responsibilities—those pieces of herself that made her who she was—could not be so easily set aside.
“Ashley…”
Her lips pressed against his to trap his words, her thighs clenched tightly around him.
“Don’t think about it,” she murmured. “Just go with it.”
David, being the smart man that he was, didn’t say another word.
AT 7:00 A.M., THE PHONE RANG. Ashley’s cell.
She untwisted herself from David, and reached to the nightstand.
“Hello?”
“Ashley? It’s your mother.”
“Mom?” Her mother’s voice was shaky and afraid. Instantly, Ashley knew.
“It’s Val. I don’t know what to do. Last night…”
Ashley’s heart stopped because this wasn’t fair. She had reconciled herself to her own happy ending. She wanted to believe, she wanted to hope.
Her mother’s words rushed out in one frantic sentence. “Shedidn’tcomehome.”
10
ASHLEY DIDN’T BOTHER to shower. It would have taken too much time. She threw her clothes in her carry-on, stuffing the floppy hat on her head.
David sat up. His eyes were full of concern. “What’s wrong?”
Ashley jammed her toiletries into the side pocket of her carry-on. “Nothing. Nothing is wrong. I have to get home.”
“Is something wrong with your mom?”
“No.” She glanced down, realizing that she wasn’t dressed. God. Furiously she unzipped the carry-on and pulled out some shorts and a shirt. She had worn them before, and they would be wrinkled. Screw the wrinkles.
“Is it your niece?”
“No.”
He stood and calmly pulled on his jeans, as if he knew exactly what to do. No panicking. No caring about wrinkles. “Your sister?”
She didn’t bother to answer. She was too close to tears.
“Ashley.”
She looked up. “I just need to be home. Okay? Where’s my feet?”
His eyes darkened with pain, and she didn’t want to be the cause of it, but right now, that wasn’t her concern. Tomorrow it would be. But not today.
“Feet?” he asked, all pain gone, the careful mask back in place.
“Slippers. I need my slippers.” She saw the pink fur bulging from the side pocket. There. She was ready.
David pulled a shirt over his head. “I’ll drive you to the airport.”
“Don’t worry about it. Get some sleep. I’ll catch a cab.”
“I want to drive you to the airport,” he said again, being a gentleman, being stubborn, being David.
“I don’t need your help,” she nearly shouted. She knew she could handle this. She always handled this, always taken charge when Val disappeared—for days, weeks, months at a time. Today was different. She couldn’t juggle David and Val at the same time, they were both too demanding, and she wasn’t that good.
David merely stared, and this time there was no pain, only the icy coolness of a man who knows that unfeeling is wiser.
Ashley looked away, found the brown walls, the gutted remains of the candles. “I have to leave.”
His eyes raked over the room, the rumpled bed, and then he looked away as well. “Sure. I had a great time. Loads of fun. Call me.”
HER PLANE LANDED at O’Hare at one in the afternoon, and the first person she saw when she entered her house was Val. Apparently, she was no longer missing.
Ashley, nonviolent, marshmallow Ashley, threw her carry-on across the room.
“What the hell did you do?”
Val’s face crumpled because Ashley never yelled, never cursed and never got mad. No, Ashley let people beat on her over and over again.
“I was helping someone from AA. She called last night. I’m her sponsor. She needed help, Ashley. I could help her.”
Ashley pulled a hand through her tangled hair. “Why didn’t you call Mom and tell her? Val, you know what Mom will think if you disappeared. You
know what I would think if you disappeared.”
“My phone wasn’t charged. I forgot.” It was typical Val. Life with a recovering alcoholic was like having another child. No, that was an overstatement. Brianna was easier.
Ashley swore. “Where’s Mom?”
“I don’t know. I guess she took Brianna to school this morning and then left for work.”
“Does she know you’re okay?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t you think you should tell her, Val?”
Val scuffed at the floor with her bare foot. “She’ll be mad.”
“No, Val, she won’t get mad at you.” Not like I’m mad at you.
Reluctantly Val called their mother, and there were quiet murmurs as Val reassured her. Now that the crisis was over, now that Ashley knew that her sister hadn’t been drinking, she collapsed, exhausted, into a chair. Her hand covered her face, partly because her eyes hurt, and partly because she didn’t want to look at Val right now. Her family had always been her first concern, and Jacob hadn’t minded. No, that was part of the problem in their marriage. Honestly, he hadn’t even noticed. But David noticed. David cared. He wasn’t a man who liked being left alone in a Miami hotel room. Divorce did that to you—made you see everything as a betrayal.
Ashley understood.
“Ashley?” There was Val. Though she wasn’t looking at her, Ashley could imagine the neediness on her face. Val wanted to know that everything was all right, but it wasn’t all right.
After years of thinking Val would be okay, and instead Ashley rescuing her over and over again, gullibility had transformed into a protective sort of paranoia, mostly for cause. However, Val needed to know that disappearing all night was not acceptable behavior. She had to teach Val to be responsible.
Her hand fell from her face, and Ashley let Val see years of anger in all its rawness. Val flinched. Ashley barreled on. “You couldn’t borrow a phone? Didn’t you think we’d worry?”
“I didn’t think. You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” Val socked her fist into the couch. “Even when I’m doing something right I still screw it up.”
Ashley sighed, resigned to the unteachable. “You’re not screwing up. We didn’t know. We worried.”
“You don’t trust me. Thirteen months sober, and you still don’t trust me. I have worked my ass off to get you and Mom to stop looking at me like I’m going to raid your wallet, or wreck the car, or call from jail, but it’s never gonna stop, is it?”
Brianna would be home soon. Their mother would be home soon. Ashley was still wearing the bunny slippers and the smell of David. She couldn’t fight this battle. Not now.
“Val…”
Val socked the couch again. This time, a lot harder. “Shut up, Ashley.” Val stalked off and Ashley, resigned to having hurt the entire world, turned on the television. Her eyes processed a new method for making homemade pierogi on the Food Channel, her mind blessedly blank, until she heard Val’s footfalls on the wooden floor.
Softer footfalls, not nearly as mad.
Ashley immediately noticed the tear stains, the swollen eyes that looked full of hurt, and she wished the medical community had some pill, some shot that could take away Val’s pain and give her confidence.
“I’m sorry,” muttered Val. “Of course you’re not going to trust me.”
“I trusted you.”
Val laughed with heavy scorn, and no humor at all. “You flew home because you thought everything was fine? No, you flew home because you thought I was out drunk, throwing up vodka at some shithole bar, and you knew Mom couldn’t handle it by herself.”
“I didn’t think that, Val.” Actually, she had thought it, but she wanted to be wrong. That should count for something.
All her life Val had been searching for strength. Sadly, the only place Val found strength was in her sister. “You shouldn’t have to put up with this. I’m sorry. I don’t want to let you down, Ash.”
Ashley closed her eyes. She was tired and hungry, and now she wanted a hot, cleansing shower, so that the tangles from her hair would disappear, so that she wouldn’t smell David on her skin. She had left Miami for nothing. The wanting was still there, a painful ache, and she didn’t need those wants, nor those aches. Well, at least now, she, David and Val could all be miserable at once.
Slowly she uncurled from her chair and accepted the world she had, not the world she wanted. She noted Val’s tortured eyes and her patience snapped. Self-misery didn’t set well with her.
“You don’t want to let me down? Then don’t!”
THE FLOPPY HAT stayed hopelessly slung on the chipped, wooden four-poster. The bunny slippers stayed neatly lined up in the closet, breathlessly awaiting their next outing.
Ashley’s days were spent coaching Sophie on the ins and outs of the radically diverse Lakeview clientele, which was a talent unto itself. The women of north Chicago weren’t Gold Coast socialites, needing the latest from Nordstrom. No, they wanted retro and ripped. And if a man wanted to buy himself a dress, you didn’t blink twice, and told him his hips definitely did not look too fat in that skirt.
At the Wicker Park store, Scarlett was going great guns. When Ashley had first goggled at the graffiti window display, Scarlett had brandished her spray-paint can proudly, not sensing the property-insurance-rate-hike fear in Ashley’s risk-management heart. However, to give the woman her due, instead of looking trashed, the place now had an urban feel that actually mixed well with the street’s other businesses.
Alas, sales at the Naperville store were down three-point-seven percent. Probably the latest in nonwrinkle fabric that Ashley had embarrassingly gone overboard with. Altogether her bottom line was slowly sinking into the red.
Each day, after she got home, she punched the numbers into her computer, and her spirits fell a little further, so much so that she almost stopped doing it, but David had taught her to follow the numbers—no matter how bad.
If the numbers were bad, the nights were the worst. Sitting up in her bed, cell phone in hand, willing it to ring. He didn’t call. No surprise there.
She had seen the damage in his eyes when she left the hotel room, and she knew he didn’t like to hurt. Honestly, who did? He’d show the pain for a flash of a second, and then it would disappear behind that brick wall of stubbornness, as if he wanted to be somehow impenetrable to pain.
Hence, no call.
It took her seven days to call him, which sounded like a long time, but she had to carefully plot out what she wanted to say. David deserved to know about Val. He deserved to know about Val’s issues, but Ashley had never liked discussing her sister. Val’s skeletons were firmly wedged deep in the Larsen closet right next to Ashley’s slippers.
Talking about Val’s problems felt vaguely traitorous, like laughing at someone else’s bad haircut or discussing a fashion-don’t behind a friend’s back. But she knew she had to tell David the truth. Their relationship was no longer causal, something more than stranger sex. She didn’t know exactly what, but whereas she had a certain loyalty to her family, now she had a certain loyalty to him as well.
He picked up on the fourth ring. Either he was in a meeting, or else he was upset. Considering it was a Friday night, 9:00 p.m. on the east coast, she was betting on the latter.
“Hello?”
“It’s Ashley.”
Silence.
Okay, he was angry. He didn’t know her problems because she had not shared with him. And if she had shared her problems, he wouldn’t be mad.
“Why are you mad?” she asked. It didn’t seem right to blurt out, “My sister is an alcoholic.” Some things needed buildup.
“I’m not mad,” he answered, which was nice because it helped to provide the necessary buildup.
“You’re mad.”
“I’m mad,” he said. Look how easy they fell into the same rhythms, the same arguments, the same routine. The consistency only made her sad. Seeing her hat, she took it off the bed post and perched it on her head. I
t made her feel better.
“I had a family emergency,” she told him, still working on the buildup.
“I get that, Ashley. I understand that. But don’t you think you can tell me why you left? I was worried, I was thinking, why won’t she tell me? Is it because it’s awful, or because it’s nothing? For all I know, your sister had a hangnail and that’s why you ran.”
“It wasn’t a hangnail.”
“Then what was it?”
Ashley gathered her courage and prepared to tell her sister’s worst-kept secret. Slowly the tongue got it together, the lips formed the right sounds and the words haltingly emerged. “She drinks. Drinks too much. She used to drink. She doesn’t anymore. But it hasn’t been very long.”
“How long?”
“Thirteen months, seven days. It wasn’t fun.”
For a moment, he was quiet. “Why did you leave Miami?” he asked, as if she hadn’t just told him that her sister was a recovering alcoholic, and still wasn’t in a good place.
“My mother called. Val was missing. She’s found now.”
“Sober?” he asked crisply, as if they were checking off boxes on a survey.
“Sober. She’d just left her phone off. No big deal,” she said. “Now do you understand?” With restless fingers, she played with the brim of the hat. Letting it droop down in her eyes, pushing it off to the side. Nothing seemed right.
“How old is your sister?”
“Thirty.” And they were back to the survey questions. “She has a daughter. Eight years old. There was no one to take care of Brianna, that’s my niece, except for Mom, and she’s, oh, I don’t know, but it’s not a good idea. I had to be here.” Ashley stared at herself in the mirror, and the floppy hat didn’t seem so jazzy anymore.
“Does she do this a lot?”
Ashley didn’t know what to say. Over the past thirteen months, life had been fairly quiet, especially compared to Val’s bender that had lasted through most of Brianna’s second year. That had been followed by three years of sobriety. But then Val had tried to go to community college, and instead spent most of her afternoons skipping class and sitting in the pub. Neither Ashley nor their Mom had known about that lost semester until the grades showed up in the mail. “It comes and goes.”
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