Date Next Door

by Gina Wilkins

  Maybe she was reading too much into things again, but she had been badly shaken when Joel had seemed to be pushing her into the same career his late wife had once pursued. Surely he hadn’t meant it that way. It probably had just been a spur-of-the-moment comment made in response to something he’d thought she said. But telling herself that didn’t ease the sick feeling deep inside her stomach.

  At his office, Joel had just finished caring for a child with a painful ear infection and was spending a few minutes returning telephone calls, before moving toward an exam room for the next appointment.

  “Hey, Joel,” his partner, Bob McCafferty, called from down the hallway. “Did you hear the news?”

  “No, what news?”

  “There was a hostage situation over by the tracks this morning. Some meth-head holed up with his ex-girlfriend and her kid. Threatened to kill himself and take them with him—and a few cops to boot. I heard your neighbor was right in the middle of it all.”

  Joel literally felt his heart skip a beat. “Nic?” he managed to say coherently, his hand clenching around the chart he held. “Is she…?”

  Bob held up a hand and shook his head. “Chill. She’s okay. From what I heard, no one was hurt. It got hairy for a while, but it all ended okay.”

  The breath left Joel’s lungs in a rush that left him a little dizzy. “That’s…good to hear.”

  “Big excitement for this town, huh? I bet your neighbor will have a good story to share with you later.”

  “Yeah. I’ll have to be sure and ask her about it,” Joel said grimly. “Excuse me, Bob, I’ve got a patient waiting.”

  He needed to stay very busy for the rest of the day, he told himself. Too busy to think about what might have happened.

  As he pasted on a professional smile and pushed open the door to the examining room, he could almost hear the echo of his mother’s voice reminding him that anyone who cared about a police officer would have to learn to live with daily fear.

  It was time for him to do some very serious thinking about his relationship with Officer Nicole Sawyer.

  “I don’t think I can handle this, Nic.”

  A sick feeling inside her, Nic stared at the man who faced her from a few feet away in her living room, his expression stark. This scene was becoming all too familiar, she realized on a wave of sadness. She knew exactly what was coming next.

  “Let me guess,” she said unsteadily. “It’s not me. It’s you.”

  Looking miserable, Joel shoved his hands into the pockets of his dark slacks. “I think you’re being sarcastic, but you’re right. It isn’t you. I’m the one who has a problem with your work.”

  “This might make sense to me if I was on the job in New York or L.A. Hell, even Little Rock,” she added bitterly. “But here? Sorry, Joel, this sounds like a pretty feeble excuse to break it off.”

  “It isn’t an excuse. It’s an explanation.”

  “Look, if you’re tired of being together, just say so, okay? We never said this was a long-term thing. We were just having some fun together. If it isn’t fun for you anymore, then fine. It’s over. No hard feelings.”

  Just a broken heart she would never let him see, she promised herself, her chin high, her eyes dry—and they would remain that way, at least until she was alone.

  He scowled. “You haven’t heard anything I’ve said, have you? It wasn’t just a good time for me. It was real. Too damned real.”

  She wasn’t sure she believed him. Maybe because it would hurt too badly to think he had really fallen for her but still didn’t truly understand her. “Yeah, okay. It was real. And now it’s over. Because I’d rather be a police officer than to become something else you would choose for me.”

  “Because you’re reckless,” he shot back at her, looking almost angry now. “Because you take chances you don’t have to take. Because you’re the first one to jump into the middle of a fight. The one who breaks the rules even if it means you could get hurt. I can’t spend every day worrying that the next time, you’ll go too far. I care about you far too much for that. But you won’t even consider making a few changes to keep yourself safe.”

  “I won’t try to turn myself into someone I’m not just to make it easier for you to be with me,” she said fiercely. “This is who I am, Joel. I’m not a saint. I don’t have an advanced degree. I don’t want to be a counselor. I’m a cop. As much as I care about you, I can’t change for you. It just wouldn’t work.”

  Her veiled references to Heather had made Joel’s eyes darken and his mouth thin to a hard slit. “I haven’t asked you to be anyone but yourself,” he growled. “All I’ve ever wanted is for you to be careful. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

  She twisted her hands in front of her. “Did you ever tell your mother we were dating? Or Ethan?”

  He blinked, disconcerted by the apparent non sequitur. “I don’t—”

  “Did you?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I—” He paused, then shrugged. “I guess I was waiting for the right time.”

  “But you never really thought that time would come, did you? You didn’t think it would last long enough for you to have to tell them. And you didn’t want to have to admit to them that they were right when they told you I was all wrong for you.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “The fact is, you never argued when everyone told you how wrong I was for you because you agreed with them. And you know why I’m all wrong, Joel? Because I’m not Heather! You could try all you want to turn me into her, but it would never work, as I guess you’ve finally figured out for yourself.”

  Several shades of color drained from his face. She might have felt guilty about it, but the more she thought about him dumping her just because she’d performed her job that day, the angrier she became.

  “That was incredibly unfair. I never compared you to Heather.”

  “Didn’t you?” She stalked to the door and opened it. “You know what, Joel? You’re right. It isn’t me. It’s you. And I think you’d better leave now.”

  “Nic—”

  “Please go.”

  He sighed. “If that’s what you want. I’ll call you later.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll be busy.” Okay, so maybe she was being churlish. She was mad.

  He left without another word. Just walked out, taking her heart with him.

  Nic thought about bursting into tears, but she was too angry even for that. She paced instead, muttering beneath her breath.

  When the doorbell rang twenty minutes later, she almost didn’t answer it. If it was Joel, she didn’t want to talk to him. And she wasn’t in the mood to visit with anyone else. Except Aislinn maybe. And because suddenly she knew who was calling, she opened the door.

  Aislinn took one look at Nic’s face and closed the door behind her. “It must have been bad.”

  “He dumped me,” Nic said, forcing the words out between clenched teeth. “Joel dumped me.”

  “Nic, I’m so sorry—”

  Nic swallowed hard, holding up a hand to stop Aislinn’s expression of sympathy. “Can you believe he had the nerve to give me The Speech?”

  Her friend grimaced. “Not—”

  “Yeah, that one. The it’s-not-you-it’s-me spiel. The jerk.”

  Aislinn walked into the kitchen, reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of wine. “Tell me from the beginning,” she said, opening the cabinet where Nic stored the wineglasses.

  Nic was already digging in the freezer for ice cream. “He started yelling at me pretty much the minute I opened the door to him. For doing my job this morning—can you believe that?”

  “The hostage situation? I heard about it. Everyone was talking about it.”

  Nic shook her head impatiently. “Everyone was probably exaggerating. It wasn’t that big a deal. The guy was all talk. He never even took a shot at us.”

  “Joel didn’t find any comfort in that?” Aislinn
asked, pouring generous servings of wine.

  An enormous scoop of ice cream plopped into a bowl. “He wasn’t interested in hearing it. Can you believe he actually asked if I would consider quitting my job?”

  Aislinn winced. “Surely not.”

  “He said he didn’t think he could ever get used to my work. The way he phrased it made me think he was hoping I would volunteer to quit if it made him happy.”

  “Maybe you misunderstood.”

  Nic slid a bowl across the table to Aislinn and stabbed a spoon into her own mound of toffee-chip. “Trust me, I didn’t misunderstand. He called me reckless. He said he wished I were more like Heather.”

  Aislinn set down her spoon with a clatter. “He didn’t say that.”

  Nic flushed. “Okay, he didn’t say those words exactly. But he told me the other night that I should become a counselor for at-risk kids. I told you Heather was a family counselor. Do you really think that’s simply a coincidence?”

  “It does sound bad,” Aislinn admitted.

  “I can’t let Joel turn me into a pale copy of his late wife.”

  “You really think that’s what he’s trying to do?”

  Nic pushed aside her barely touched bowl of ice cream and reached for her wine. “It’s the only way I’d be an acceptable match for him. To his friends and family. Even to him.”

  “Oh, Nic—”

  The sympathy in Aislinn’s voice broke through some of the anger that had been protecting Nic from the pain. She swallowed hard against a sudden thick lump in her throat. “It was a mistake from the beginning.”

  “You fell in love with him, didn’t you?”

  Nic set down her wine untasted. With anyone else, she would have given an immediate vehement denial. Because it was Aislinn, she said, “I’ll get over it.”

  “You don’t think there’s a chance…?”

  “He dumped me,” she reminded her. “He said he couldn’t accept what—and who—I am. Does that sound like there’s a chance?”

  “Not really, no,” Aislinn admitted sadly.

  Even though she’d said it herself, it hurt to hear Aislinn confirm it.

  “You had a feeling this wasn’t going to work out well, didn’t you?”

  Aislinn made patterns in her ice cream with her spoon. “I had a feeling you were going to be hurt,” she admitted. “I did try to warn you.”

  “I know. And I didn’t listen. I thought it would be worth it.”

  Looking at her intently, Aislinn asked, “And was it?”

  Nic rolled her glass between her hands, giving the question some thought. The last few weeks had been so special that she could hardly look back at them now without tears. Would she eventually be able to think of them with pleasure, treasuring the moments she and Joel had spent together, savoring the memories of lazy evenings and passionate interludes?

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Give it time. And whenever you need to talk, you know I’m here.”

  Nic nodded.

  “There’s just one more thing I need to say, and then we’ll change the subject for now, okay?”

  “What is it?”

  Aislinn reached out to lay her hand on Nic’s arm, a warm, supportive gesture. “It really isn’t you, Nic. There’s nothing at all wrong with you. You don’t have to compare yourself to anyone.”

  Tears threatened then, but Nic blinked them back. “Thanks. You could be a little biased.”

  “Hell, yes. But I’m still right.”

  Managing a weak smile, Nic reached for her ice cream again. “Well, of course you are. You’re always right.”

  Aislinn’s answering smile was strained. “There are times when I wish I were wrong.”

  He didn’t really want to, but Joel went home for Thanksgiving. He might have made excuses to stay away that year, claiming to be too busy with work, but it seemed so important to his mother for him to come. Besides, his father had been ill—nothing too serious, just an upper-respiratory infection—and Joel would have felt too guilty to skip out on them, even though he’d been home only a few weeks before for the reunion.

  He regretted his decision almost immediately. The memories that haunted him here now were ones of Nic. Every time he passed the guest room, he half expected to see her in the doorway. Each time one of his parents said something that amused him, he found himself looking for her to share a secret smile.

  He noticed that he had begun to walk down the upstairs hallway without looking at the walls. For the first time all those old pictures bugged him. He hadn’t realized how much his family was stuck in the past. What was keeping them from moving on? Was it partially his fault?

  Maybe it was past time he put away a few photographs of his own.

  Having arrived late Wednesday afternoon, he would be leaving early Saturday morning. He stayed close to his parents’ house during his visit, not particularly anxious to run into any of his old classmates again so soon.

  His mother waited until Friday afternoon to broach the subject of Nic. Everyone had asked about her as soon as he’d arrived, of course, but after he’d assured them she was fully recovered from her fall, they hadn’t mentioned her again.

  “Have you seen Nicole much lately?” Elaine asked as she and Joel worked on a jigsaw puzzle together at a table in one corner of the den. It was one of her favorite hobbies, and she often drafted her husband or one of her sons into helping her, mostly just to keep her company.

  “Not really,” he said, keeping his gaze focused on the jumble of puzzle pieces. “We’ve both been busy. It’s been a couple of weeks since we talked.”

  He didn’t add that he, for one, had been very careful to avoid running into Nic, and he was sure she had done the same thing. Considering they lived only a few yards apart, it was odd how few fleeting glimpses he’d had of her since their breakup two weeks earlier.

  “So she hasn’t had any dangerous escapades lately?”

  Joel scowled down at the puzzle piece in his hand. It really should fit into the section in front of him, but he couldn’t seem to find a place for it. “She’s a police officer, Mom. What you and I might consider dangerous escapades are just a typical part of her work week.”

  The bitterness he heard in his own voice made him grimace. So maybe he was exaggerating just a little. As Nic herself had pointed out, it wasn’t as if she worked a SWAT team in a teeming metropolis. But the fact was, she did respond to dangerous domestic-disturbance calls. And she did confront the occasional violent addict or aggressive drunk.

  She spent a great deal of her time dealing with people who broke the law and were resistant to the idea of being punished for doing so. She wore a sidearm as casually as some women donned pearls. Downplay it all she wanted, her job was a dangerous one.

  Elaine shook her head in disapproval. “I don’t know how her mother deals with the worry. It must be so difficult for her.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only met her mother once, soon after I moved in next door. But she seemed to have come to terms with Nic’s job.”

  Nic had told him that her mother had initially been resistant to the idea of her daughter joining the police force, but she’d come around because she wanted Nic to pursue a career she loved and in which she could make a difference. He wondered why Nic’s family hadn’t tried harder to convince her that there were many other jobs that could provide her with that same satisfaction.

  Elaine slipped a puzzle piece into place. “I have a little confession to make,” she said without looking up. “I worried for a while that you and Nicole were romantically involved.”

  “We aren’t,” Joel said shortly, still trying to find a match for the piece he held.

  “Good. She’s a very nice young woman, but I just don’t think she’s right for you.”

  He glanced up at her from across the game table, trying to think of a response to that. And then he looked back down at the puzzle, unable to quite meet his mother’s eyes. “Maybe it’s the other way around, Mom. Maybe I
’m not right for her.”

  Elaine shook her head, sounding confused when she said, “I don’t really see the difference.”

  “I know you don’t. But I do.”

  For some reason, he was able at that moment to fit the puzzle piece he held into its position. He snapped it into place with more force than was absolutely necessary.

  And then he drew a deep breath and looked back up at his mother. “I think we need to talk about your photo gallery upstairs.”

  Nic was tired. She didn’t know why she was so weary. She’d slept well enough the night before, and nothing particularly eventful had occurred that day. She was well aware that the exhaustion was more emotional than physical.

  Maybe it was because the days were getting so very short, and it seemed to be dark more than it was light these days. But even as that thought crossed her mind, she knew it wasn’t the real reason. This wasn’t general seasonal depression. It had a very specific cause.

  She would get past this, she promised herself. She’d been hurt, true, but her heart would heal, just as her body had done after her fall. Maybe it would take a little longer this time. Maybe it would take a lot longer. But she’d be okay. She always was.

  She opened her refrigerator. She wasn’t particularly hungry, but she would eat. She wasn’t going to be one of those scorned women who sat around moping and wasting away, letting her health deteriorate. She wouldn’t let anyone do that to her, not even the only man she’d ever allowed to steal her heart.

  When she heard Joel’s tap on the back door, her first, uncharacteristically cowardly instinct was to pretend she wasn’t home. It was pride more than the knowledge that he surely knew she was there that made her draw a deep breath, square her shoulders and open the door.

  He looked like hell. Matt Damon after a weeklong bender maybe, she thought irrelevantly—even if Aislinn didn’t see the resemblance.

  Maybe she had been sleeping okay, but Joel obviously had not. And even as her heart clenched, she knew she couldn’t allow herself to be influenced by his obvious misery—not if it meant she had to sacrifice who she was in order to try and make him happy again.