About Last Night

by Ruthie Knox

  “My mom was English,” she said. “And I work in English history, assisting a curator at the V and A. Though mostly what I do is study knitting.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, searching her eyes for something. He knew what she’d just done. Maybe he was looking for the reason. “Is that so?” he asked finally, his lips curving slowly into a smile. “I’m glad to know it.” He drew her to him for a deep, slow kiss that made her heart thud and her blood rush. A kiss for sharing secrets and holding hands and making love. A kiss that made her soft and vulnerable and okay with it.

  When they came up for air, he leaned his forehead against hers. “Anything else you want to tell me, love, I’m listening. Anything at all.”

  She waited for the panic to arrive, but it must’ve missed the train. Instead, she was calm. Slightly aroused. Hungry for dinner. Pleased with herself.

  Huh.

  “Thanks,” she said. “But let’s just eat and watch the movie, okay?”

  Nev didn’t have a TV, so they dragged the computer out of his office and set it up on a chair opposite the couch in the studio.

  Cath soon lost herself in the story of George Bailey, the boy who’d wanted to see the world but instead spent his life trapped in Bedford Falls, sacrificing everything he wanted for the love of a good woman and to take care of his fellow man.

  She hadn’t seen the movie in years—had been afraid to, actually, because she and her parents had always watched it together at Christmas. But Nev had a serious gap in his general knowledge when it came to American cinema, and she’d vowed to do something about it.

  The film carried its own freight car of memories: she knew every scene, almost every line. Spooned against him on the couch with his arm around her, though, she was okay. More than okay.

  George and Mary were in the taxi on the way to their honeymoon when Nev’s free hand started roaming, and before long he was kissing her neck and pressing something hard into her backside. She couldn’t keep herself from pushing back against him, any more than she could keep her heart rate from spiking and her breasts from begging for attention whenever he touched her. She did manage to offer a token protest. “You’re supposed to be watching the movie. There’s a really good part coming up.”

  “I’m multitasking.”

  The hand meandered inside her shirt and paused, flat against her stomach, while George and Mary rescued the Bailey Building and Loan. Then his clever fingers unsnapped her shorts, lowered her zipper, and rested, cupping her curls.

  She lifted her hips, urging him to continue, and Nev chuckled. He dipped one finger inside her and dragged it slowly upward. Cath drew in a shaky breath and let it out again. She would never get tired of the way he touched her. It simply wasn’t possible.

  “Your knickers are soaked, Mary Catherine,” he whispered in her ear. “Shall I take them off?”

  “Shh. You’ll spoil the movie.” But her eyelids had drifted closed.

  Nev reached out to pause the DVD. “Time for the intermission.”

  Before they restarted the movie, Nev disappeared from the room and returned with a wrapped present. “What’s this for?” she asked as she took it from him.

  He shrugged.

  Cath tore off the paper. No one had ever spoiled her like Nev did. He was always bringing her little offerings, coffee at the train station, a new notebook to write in. Keys to his flat.

  “Oreos! Oh, Nev, where did you find them?”

  He grinned, delighted with her reaction. “I happened to see them at Sainsbury’s.”

  Cath leaned in to kiss him in thanks, and he cupped her face in his hand, his eyes showing a tenderness he usually kept better concealed. Though she knew it was there. She was stupid about him, but she wasn’t that stupid.

  “Do you know that’s the first time you’ve ever used my name?” he asked.

  She pressed her cheek against his fingers and closed her eyes. “You’re always Nev in my head,” she confessed. It was a night for confessions, apparently.

  He kissed her forehead. “This film is making you sentimental.”

  “Nah, it’s the cookies.” She tore the cellophane open. “Do you have any milk?”

  “Sorry, love. Milk is for children. And Americans.”

  They turned the movie back on and ate the Oreos. Nev agreed they were disgusting and had almost as many as she did. The cookies on top of dinner on top of whiskey made her stomach sort of bloaty, and the movie suffused her with a helpless, desperate love for humankind. Holding Nev’s hand in the flickering dark gave her an anchor.

  When all the citizens of Bedford Falls rushed to George’s house to help in his hour of need, she cried. She always did. But this time, she couldn’t stop. Something about seeing George surrounded by his wife and children, his family and friends—everybody who loved him singing “Auld Lang Syne” together at Christmas—hit her like a punch in the gut.

  Before her dad died, she’d known what it felt like to be part of a family like that, to be embedded in a place, surrounded by people who knew her and loved her. She’d had uncles and cousins and manicotti after mass on Sunday. Storytelling and good-natured joking, church shoes and a Christmas stocking with her name on it.

  It had been a million years since she belonged anywhere, or to anyone.

  Nev drew her onto his lap and rubbed her back. She burrowed against him, letting his familiar male smell smooth over the rough edges and the thud of his heartbeat against her cheek dull her pain. When she ran out of tears, he wiped her face with the flat of his hand and kissed her.

  “Want to tell me what that was all about?” he asked.

  She did want to. No surprise there. The surprise was that she was going to.

  Screw the rules. If she was doomed to get her heart broken by Nev—and she absolutely was—what was the point of trying to protect it with a flimsy little fence? She wouldn’t do it anymore. She’d trust him the way he deserved to be trusted. When he inevitably figured out she was no good and kicked her to the curb, it would give her one more thing to regret. But until then, she wanted to know what it felt like to belong to him.

  “My parents are dead,” she said. “And I have a horrible family.”

  He smoothed his palm over her hair. “What sort of horrible?”

  “Too big, too loud, too nosy. Too mobbed-up.”

  “Mobbed-up?”

  “Mafia,” she explained. “We’re pretty well-known in Chicago. Good for getting a table at a restaurant. Not so good if you have moral objections to racketeering.”

  “I see.” His mouth flattened out, and he seemed to be searching for something neutral to say.

  Cath smiled. “Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s my great-uncle Pete who’s the real criminal mastermind. My dad was squeaky-clean. He was a lawyer, and he mostly did really boring stuff—contracts and divorces and whatnot—I think because he wanted to avoid being asked to defend his brothers and uncles and cousins when they got into trouble. He loved his family, though, so we were all close. Except Mom. She wasn’t so fond of the Talaricos. Honestly, I don’t know how she ever ended up with Dad. They were so different. She liked her life quiet and neat. I think he must have seemed exciting when they first met, but then after a while she wanted the excitement to die down, so she had a baby, and I turned out just like him.” She paused, then added, “I drove her up the wall.”

  “You must miss him.” He traced the shape of her ear with his finger. She rose a bit so her cheek brushed against his scratchy throat, then nestled closer, appreciating the heat of his skin against hers and the way he breathed, steady and slow.

  “I do. But I’m kind of used to that. What gets to me is that I miss all of them.” She looked up at him. “When I left Chicago, I was sure I’d never go back. I burned every possible bridge.”

  Very funny, Cath. What she’d actually done was set her own house on fire—technically Jimmy’s house, but what was his was hers. It had sort of been an accident, but she’d gotten herself a
rrested for arson. Uncle Pete had come to the rescue, and she’d acted about as grateful as a pit viper. Tattoo number two.

  She didn’t have to tell Nev everything at once, though.

  “And now you’d like to go back?”

  She ran her hand across his chest. He was wearing an old T-shirt, dark blue, the slogan so faded it was illegible. Soft fabric over hard muscle. She didn’t want to go anywhere. She wanted to stay here with him.

  “Nah. But I wouldn’t mind a do-over.”

  He gave her a sad smile. “We don’t get do-overs, love.”

  It was a shame. There were so many things to fix. If she had another shot at her youth, she’d make more of an effort to get along with her mother. Keep herself from getting knocked up by Jimmy, or at least refuse to marry him. Or maybe pick up the story later and do better after she went out on her own. She’d take back those lost years when she’d drifted around Europe, chasing after musicians and artists and dreams, and she’d spend them in college instead.

  But then, there was the butterfly-effect thing. If she had changed anything, her life would have taken a different path, and she wouldn’t be here with Nev.

  “No, we don’t. That’s okay, though. This is pretty good.”

  Shifting so that she straddled his lap, she took Nev’s head in her hands and looked at him. The familiar planes of his handsome face. Those eyes, nearly black in the dim light, but still as warm and caring as ever. She kissed him once on the lips. Then she kissed his cheekbones and the space between his eyebrows. His closed eyes and the bridge of his nose. His scratchy chin and the spot right next to his ear that made his breath hitch. She’d never allowed herself to touch him like this before, not without sullying it with sex. Never told him with her lips and her fingers what she felt about him when she allowed herself to feel. Hopeful. Fragile. Joyful.

  His expression reflected all of it back at her, the pleasure in his eyes a banked coal she wanted to carry around with her always.

  She leaned back and watched him as she said, “I had good news at work today.”

  He waited.

  She waited.

  “Go on then,” he said at last.

  She took a deep breath. “They’re going to put my name on the exhibit catalog as co-author.”

  “You wrote a book?”

  “Half a book. And it’s only about knitting. Nobody will read it. People just buy them as souvenirs and look at the pictures.”

  His dimple peeked out over that. “Nonsense. I’m sure loads of people will read it.” He pressed a kiss to the juncture of her neck and shoulder. “And they’ll all think how clever you are. But I’ll be the only one who gets to take you to bed.”

  When he raised his head, he was smiling. She had genuinely pleased him. It hadn’t occurred to her that sharing her news would make him as happy as it made her. Somehow, handing this information to him was like him giving her the keys. A declaration of their mutual entanglement.

  It ought to have scared her, she knew. A few hours ago, it had scared her witless. But it didn’t. She was going to trust him. For now. For as long as she could handle it, she’d trust him, and she’d see where it took them.

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling back.

  “Well done, Cath.”

  “Thank you.”

  “May I do that now? Take you to bed?”

  “You may.”

  For the first time, she stayed the night.

  Chapter Twelve

  Judith came back from her meeting with Christopher grimmer than usual. “Come in here when you’re finished with that,” she said before disappearing into her office.

  Cath looked at the catalog draft spread over the table and mentally threw in the towel. In her quest to figure out the ideal placement for thirty-four separate sidebars, she’d covered the manuscript with color-coded sticky notes, and there were so many piles and sub-piles in front of her, she’d need a flow chart to keep track of it all.

  She didn’t have a flow chart. In theory, she had her brain, but it was nearly five, and Nev was going to pick her up in ten minutes to take her for drinks and dinner. Nervous anticipation of this event had kept her on edge all afternoon. Judith had just tipped her over.

  Whatever her boss was about to tell her wouldn’t be good. Cath could count on one hand the number of times she and Judith had sat down together in her office. Usually, Judith would issue directions through the open door, or—if they needed to work together—she’d come out to sit at the conference table by Cath’s desk. Judith had used the office to tell Cath when the funding for her temp position ran out and on a few other equally disastrous occasions. The office was for bad news.

  “Spill it,” Cath said, holding on to the doorjamb with both hands and leaning in. She would prefer not to actually enter the office. That way, the bad-news juju couldn’t touch her.

  “Sit down.” Judith’s mouth was set in its usual frown.

  “That bad?” She moved behind the chair Judith kept for guests, bracing her hands on the back.

  “Alliant has pulled its sponsorship. Apparently they’re in some financial trouble, and they’ve decided to scale back on their gifts. Christopher says that without their money, we can’t afford to publish the catalog.”

  That bad. She moved around to the front of the chair and fell into it with all the grace of a chopped-down tree. “The exhibit?”

  “Will still go on. We’ll have to cut back on publicity some, but Christopher decided to let the catalog take the bulk of the hit. He’s hoping the show will draw enough people that we can afford to publish the book down the road.”

  “Except with less publicity, it’s not very likely,” she said, thinking out loud. “And even if it were, by the time he decided to have the thing edited, laid out, and printed, we’d have to wait weeks, at best, for it to arrive in the gift shop.”

  “Yep. Sorry. It sucks.”

  “But I don’t get it— The catalog is supposed to make a profit, right? Or at least break even.”

  “In the long run, yes. But in the short run, it’s either kill the catalog or kill the exhibit. There isn’t enough money to go around.”

  Trying to ignore the roiling combination of disappointment, panic, and fury that was making it difficult to breathe, she asked the question she least wanted answered. “Am I going to get fired?”

  Judith looked down at her hands. “I hope not. I fought for you. But the exhibit’s on a shoestring, and without the catalog you’ve become a luxury. We’ll see.”

  Shit. Shit shit shit.

  “How much do they need?”

  “Fifty thousand pounds to get the job done right.”

  Fifty thousand pounds. Eighty thousand dollars, give or take. Too much money to sniff at. Cath must have winced, because Judith said, “Don’t look so devastated. We’ll try to find some more sponsors to pick up the slack. We have too much invested to drop it now. And anyway, this is the way the museum business goes. The funding is always a scramble.”

  Buck up, she told herself. It’s not a life-and-death situation. It’s only a stupid exhibit catalog.

  Besides, Judith was right. They might be able to find some new sponsors to back the exhibit. But that would take time, and the catalog was supposed to go to the copy editor next week. Day in and day out, she’d been fussing with sidebars and scrambling to get photo permissions lined up while her whole project was about to get the ax. The knowledge diminished her. She was a gnat on the wall of history, totally insignificant. Possibly about to get squished.

  “Thanks for telling me. I’ll just—” She’d been about to say she’d get back to the sidebars, but there would no longer be a need for sidebars. There would no longer be a need for her. “I’ll get back to work, I guess.”

  As she stood and turned to leave, Nev came through the open doorway of the office, so polished and bankerish in a three-piece navy pin-striped suit that all he needed was a gold watch chain hanging from his pocket to complete the picture. So gorgeous and familiar, a
ll she wanted to do was step into his arms and cry.

  “You found me.”

  He smiled the special greeting smile he seemed to reserve just for her and said, “It wasn’t so difficult now that you’ve told me where to look.” Glancing behind him at the door, he added, “Though there are a lot of bloody corridors to choose from. I think I might’ve tunneled beneath the Thames at one point.”

  Cath gave him a weak smile, stepping back so he and Judith had a view of each other. Might as well get this over with.

  “Judith, this is Nev Chamberlain. Nev, my boss, Judith Rhodes.”

  Judith had been scanning Nev with the calm insolence of a sated bird of prey, but her eyes brightened when she heard his name. “Nev Chamberlain, like the prime minister?”

  “Exactly like.”

  “Not the most illustrious namesake, is he?”

  Nev gave Judith his best dimpled smile. “He’s Cath’s favorite prime minister.”

  Judith glowered at him, and the combination of her expression and the situation time-warped Cath back to adolescence: she was a teenager again, standing by and watching her father interview her date. She hoped Nev could hold his own. Judith made a scary dad.

  “Only Cath would have a soft spot for the man who rolled over for Hitler,” Judith said. “She’s such a sap. Though maybe you hadn’t worked that out yet.”

  Nev leaned against the doorjamb, hands in his pockets. He didn’t look intimidated. If anything, he looked amused. “No, I had.”

  She was not a sap. And she didn’t appreciate being spoken about in the third person when she was in the room. She would have said so, but Judith spoke first.

  “So are you also aware she’s very bright and quite talented?” Judith pointed her finger at Nev. “She’s been invaluable to me.”

  It was more praise from Judith than she’d had in seven months, delivered as some sort of indefinable threat to her lover. The strangest compliment she’d ever received.

  “I have no doubt of that,” Nev replied, unflappable.

  “Does it threaten you? Most men can’t handle smart, strong women.”