Spring Fever

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “She’s playing it cool. She says she’ll listen to any offer. But she’s gonna have to hop off the fence pretty soon. The Jax offer is looking like a reality, and if our costs keep rising and our sales keep sinking the way they have been, they may cut their price, or just go away for good.”

  “Would that be a bad thing?”

  “We can’t keep going the way we have been,” Mason said. “We’ve been in a holding pattern since Dad died. Maybe it’s my fault. I’ll admit I’ve been reluctant to make any drastic changes.”

  He lowered his voice. “Not long before he died, Dad hired a food chemist to come up with some new flavors of Quixie. To extend the brand. He’d tasted and liked the key lime and pomegranate, but hated the peach soda. He’d pretty much made up his mind to do it—roll out one new flavor a year. But then he had the heart attack and died.”

  “So you put the plans on hold,” Annajane said. “Probably wise, given the economy.”

  “Maybe,” Mason said, sounding dubious. “Or maybe I’m just chicken. I keep worrying, what if I screw it up? And then I start second-guessing myself. That’s no kind of leadership. Something has to give. That’s all I know for sure.”

  He turned and gave her a half smile. “But none of this is your problem. In a way, I envy you. You can just walk away and start over. Do your job, cash your paycheck, clock out on Friday, and forget about it until Monday.”

  “Theoretically,” Annajane said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I guess maybe you’ll never be a wage slave. You care too much about stuff.”

  “Way too much.”

  He yawned and stretched and slipped his arm easily along the back of the seat.

  “Sophie is gonna miss you like crazy when you move,” he said, deliberately changing the subject.

  Annajane felt a sharp stab of sadness. “Leaving her is the hardest thing about making this move,” she said. “God, I’m going to miss her. More than you know. Do you think Celia would let her come and visit me in Atlanta? Maybe with Pokey? I really can’t stand the idea of not having her in my life.”

  “I don’t think she’d have a problem with that,” Mason said. “More importantly, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. You’re family to her. Always will be, if I have any say in the matter. Which I will.”

  “Thank you for that,” she said earnestly. “I mean it. I guess it’s weird to fall in love with your ex-husband’s child. I didn’t mean to, but not loving Sophie? That would be impossible.”

  They heard the owl hooting again, and Mason craned his neck to try to figure out where the bird might be perched.

  “What about Shane?” he said, trying to sound casual. “How do you think he’d be with having your ex’s kid hanging around?”

  “I’ve told him how much Sophie means to me,” Annajane said. “Shane loves children. And he doesn’t have a jealous bone in his body. Anyway, he’ll be traveling most of the summer.”

  “So…” Mason strung the word into two syllables. “You’ve set the wedding date?”

  “Not exactly,” Annajane said. “Shane wants to get married right away, but I’d really like to get settled in first. You know, new apartment, new job, new town. It’s a lot, you know?”

  “You’re not moving in with him?” Mason sounded surprised.

  “Why do people keep asking me that?” Annajane snapped. “Why do I have to live with him? Just because we’re engaged? Do I have something to prove?”

  “Not to me,” Mason said quickly. “Seems to me you just met the guy. Why rush? In fact, I’d say you definitely should not live together.”

  “You and Celia have been living together for months,” she pointed out.

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” he sounded impatient. “It’s not like I planned for Celia to move in with me. It just sort of happened. She left some clothes at my house, and then the place she was renting at first was so far from the office … Are you going to get mad at me if I tell you I don’t think you’re that kind of girl?”

  Annajane smiled to herself in the dark, turning away from Mason so he couldn’t see her reaction.

  “I won’t get mad if you mean that as some kind of twisted compliment.”

  “I do!” Mason said. “Of course it’s a compliment. You act like I never say anything nice to you.”

  “Do you?” She swiveled around on the leather seat to face him.

  He sighed. “Don’t I?”

  “No,” she said decisively. “You haven’t said anything, well, nice to me, in a personal way, in a really long time. You say things at work like, ‘good job’ or ‘great idea.’ Sometimes you copy me on an e-mail with a thumbs-up emoticon. But that’s not really a compliment, Mason.”

  He nodded slowly and took a deep breath. “Okay. Maybe I’m just thinking the compliments. And I got out of the habit of saying them out loud.” He paused. “Or maybe I got worried about what other people would say if I, you know, paid you special attention.”

  “People? Or Celia?”

  “Celia,” he said.

  “Why would Celia care if you’re nice to me? I’m certainly no threat to her.”

  Mason rolled his eyes. “That’s not what she thinks.”

  Annajane had to think about that for a minute.

  “Jeez,” Mason said. “This is getting pretty heavy here. I think I could use a drink.” He pointed at the dashboard in front of her. “See if my flask is still in there, would you?”

  How like him, she thought, to want to distract her once things got uncomfortably personal. She thumbed the latch of the glove box, and its contents slid onto the floorboard. She rooted around in the heap: some gas station receipts, a messily folded map, some old cassette tapes, and, finally, a handsome chased-silver flask with its characteristic inverted shape molded to fit in a gentleman’s hip pocket.

  “Here it is,” she said, holding it up. She unscrewed the cap and sniffed.

  “You still drink Maker’s Mark?” she asked, referring to the brand of whiskey he’d favored during their marriage.

  “It’s Blanton’s these days,” Mason said. “Celia introduced me to it. Try it out.”

  She took a deep drink of the warm whiskey, letting it glide slowly down her throat.

  “Pretty good,” she said reluctantly, before handing it over.

  Mason sipped, nodded, and then drank deeply, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “You and Celia were thick as thieves when she first came to Passcoe. But something happened. You really just don’t like her now, do you?”

  Instead of answering, Annajane took the flask and helped herself to another gulp of the amber liquid.

  “Not much,” she said, grateful for the courage the whiskey afforded. “But be fair. What do you think she thinks of me?”

  “Pass that back,” Mason instructed. He drank again.

  “She thinks it’s pretty weird that you’d hang around and work for me, for Quixie, that is, after we split up.”

  Annajane laid her head back against the cool leather of the headrest. “I guess a lot of people would agree with her. It certainly has inspired a lot of discussion around Passcoe.”

  “Who cares?” Mason asked. “Why can’t people mind their own business? You’re great at what you do. You’re a huge asset to the company. In fact, I still can’t quite figure out why you’re leaving. You know, aside from the Shane thing.”

  She reached over and took the flask and drained it in one long swallow. She put the empty flask on the floor and picked up one of the cassette tapes, squinting to see what it was. In the moonlight, she thought the handwriting on the white plastic case looked familiar. It was her own.

  Surprised, Annajane held it up for him to see. “Is this what I think it is?”

  “What? It’s just an old tape. I forgot it was in there.”

  But you don’t keep it with the other tapes. You keep it hidden in the glove box.

  Silently, she reached
past him and turned the key in the ignition. The headlights winked on, and she slotted the cassette into the tape deck. He switched the headlights off.

  Journey’s “Faithfully” floated out of the speakers.

  She turned to him in surprise. “This is the mix tape I made you all those years ago.”

  He shrugged it off. “It was a good tape.”

  She listened to the song and felt the whiskey warm in her belly, and she was aware of a sort of bittersweet longing, only dimly remembered, but now, achingly awful in its power.

  Annajane turned up the volume. The song drowned out the cicadas, and the chorus of spring peepers coming from a nearby farm pond, and even the bass line of the invisible barn owl, floating from the treetop.

  “You really can’t figure out why I’m leaving, Mason? Are you that dense?” She turned in the seat to face him, to see if she could tell what he was thinking.

  He bristled. “You’re leaving because of Celia? Look, I know you’ve been unhappy with some of her decisions. And maybe Davis did let her undercut your position in marketing. You know Davis. He can be a bulldozer. But if you’d just come to me, and told me you were unhappy with the way things were going…”

  His voice trailed off. His arm slid down, and his fingertips rested rightly on her shoulder.

  She felt her breath catch. Just the barest brush of a touch and she was already dizzy with the sensation.

  “I didn’t think it would make a difference,” Annajane said quietly. “Clearly, you two were getting … involved.”

  “Were we?”

  “You came about five minutes away from getting married to her yesterday,” Annajane pointed out.

  “Yeah,” his voice trailed off and he looked out into the darkness. “I’m really not sure exactly how that happened, to tell you the truth.”

  “You’re telling me it was all Celia’s idea—to get married?”

  “No,” Mason said. “I wouldn’t exactly say that.”

  “What would you say? Exactly. Come on, Mason. Tell me what’s going on here. Give me a clue, can you?”

  His hand brushed her cheek. “I’d say I must have been out of my friggin’ mind to let things get that far. Yesterday? It all seems so surreal now. I was standing there on the altar, and I saw Sophie walking towards me, and it was like I was in some kind of fog. Then that harp music started to play, and all of a sudden, here comes Celia in that damned white dress. I knew I should have been thinking about her, and how great she looked, and how glad I was. All that stuff. But then I saw you sitting in the pew, right beside Pokey. In your green dress. All I could think was—how did Annajane get in that pew? Why isn’t she walking up the aisle, toward me? What happened? What the hell happened to us?”

  Mason cupped his hand around her chin and stroked her cheek with his thumb.

  She was barely aware of the small voice in her head, like an insistent, blinking red warning signal. Turn back. Turn back.

  But she couldn’t have turned back if she wanted to. She was as drawn to Mason Bayless now as she had been as a teenager all those years ago. The red blinking faded in the dark and she was only aware of his nearness and her need.

  “My God, Annajane,” he whispered. “What’s going on? Why can’t I let go of you?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, which was good, because there was no answer. He leaned in. His whiskey-scented breath tickled her ear. His lips brushed her cheek.

  What was she doing? She didn’t care. Don’t overthink. It all feels right.

  Just like that, they kissed. So sweet, so slow. Her body had never forgotten his. Her arms went around his neck, his fingers twined naturally through her hair, and she felt a roaring in her ears. Mason pulled her closer, and she willingly went.

  His kisses were hot, urgent, relentless. His hands slid down her back, and beneath the fabric of the baseball jersey. His lucky jersey. Effortlessly, he worked his fingers under the band of her bra, finding her breasts, caressing them. His head bent, and he effortlessly pulled the shirt over her head.

  The night air came as a thrilling shock to her bare skin. Mason pulled her onto his lap, and she started to giggle at the sense memory of the steering wheel pressing against her back, but the giggle was supplanted by a gasp when his lips found her right nipple.

  “Hey!” It was a man’s voice, coming from only inches away. Next came the sound of heavy metal clinking against the driver’s side door.

  Annajane jumped. A beam of bright yellow light blinded her momentarily.

  “What the hell?”

  She dove off Mason’s lap, scrambled onto her side of the front seat, grabbed desperately for the shirt, which seemed to have been swallowed up in the bowels of the Chevelle’s floorboard. The glare was unblinking, unforgiving. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “Mason? Mason Bayless? Is that you? How the heck are you?”

  The tape was abruptly shut off. The sudden quiet was deafening.

  “It’s me, Grady,” Mason drawled. “How ’bout turning off that flashlight, and giving the lady here a little privacy, huh, buddy?”

  Annajane did not dare lift her head. Mercifully, the light was snapped off, and she somehow managed to pull the shirt over her head with trembling hands.

  In her mind, the red blinking light had transformed itself into neon foot-high letters flashing out Damn. Damn. Damn. And then the words morphed into something worse. Cheater. Cheater. Cheater.

  “Maybe you could put the shotgun away now too, huh?” Mason said.

  Shotgun? Why not kill me now? Annajane thought. Put me out of my misery.

  She inched as far away from Mason as she could get, keeping her face averted from their clueless interloper.

  “Sorry about that, Mason,” Grady Witherspoon said with a chuckle. “Gail heard music coming from down here, so I came out to investigate. Since the weather turned warm, we’ve had kids coming out here, drinking, smoking dope, raising hell. I wouldn’t care that much, but last week somebody went ripping through my patch of spring greens, mashed everything flat. Kale, radicchio, arugula. Total loss. You believe that? The gun ain’t even loaded. I just wanna scare the little pissants off before they do any more damage.”

  “Totally understandable,” Mason said easily. “I apologize for the disturbance. My bad. We’ll just be going now.”

  But before he could start the Chevelle’s engine, Grady Witherspoon craned his neck, walking all the way around the car until he stood just inches from Annajane.

  “Don’t I know you?” he asked, studying her face with interest. He snapped his fingers. “I got it! Annajane. Annajane Hudgens, right? My little sister used to babysit you when you were just a kid.”

  She thought her head would explode from shame.

  “Hello,” she said weakly, wishing the earth would open and swallow her whole.

  Finally, Mason started the car. Grady Witherspoon gave them a friendly wave. “Bye now. Tell your mama I said hey, Mason, will you?”

  Mason threw the car in reverse. “I’ll sure do that.”

  19

  Mason finally glanced over at her once they were back on the paved road. “You okay?”

  Annajane buried her face in her hands. “No.”

  “Hey,” he said softly, reaching for her hand. “It was just a kiss. Kinda embarrassing that Grady walked up and surprised us like that. But it was a long, long time coming. I’m not sorry it happened. Only sorry that we had to stop.”

  Annajane jerked her hand away from his. “We do have to stop! What we just did was not okay. It’s called cheating. And I won’t do it. I can’t. You’re engaged to another woman. I’m engaged to Shane.”

  “Allll right,” Mason said slowly. “Take it easy. Don’t get so worked up. You’re getting way ahead of yourself here. Look, Annajane, maybe this, what just happened back there, it was inevitable. Maybe it’s time we stopped avoiding each other and start thinking about us. Like we used to be.”

  Annajane felt her phone vibrating in her pocket. She took
it out and glanced at the readout. It was Shane. Talk about timing. She let the call roll over to her voice mail and tried to think rationally about her situation.

  She was suffused with shame and guilt and, yes, desperate happiness. Ten minutes ago, she’d been weak and willful. If Grady Witherspoon hadn’t arrived when he had, she would have willingly climbed into the backseat with Mason. Her hormones had betrayed her, and she’d betrayed Shane. How could she hurt Shane the way Mason hurt her all those years ago?

  “There is no us,” Annajane said.

  Mason looked at her incredulously. “You’re telling me you didn’t enjoy what happened back there at the farm? That it means nothing to you?”

  “Yes,” Annajane said. “That’s what I am telling you.”

  “You’ve got a funny way of showing it,” Mason muttered.

  “That’s not the point,” Annajane said, feeling wretched. “What we just did … that was bad … it wasn’t right. You were mad at Celia, and I was, I don’t know, I guess, maybe just feeling vulnerable and sentimental. For the way we used to be. What happened back there, it was just … revenge. And horniness.”

  “What?” he exclaimed, nearly swerving off the road.

  “We have no right to be alone together like this,” she continued. “I admit, I still have … feelings for you. I guess I always will. But there was a reason we split up. It was ugly and awful. We patched things up, yes, and figured out how to go on with our lives, separately, but I can’t pretend, Mason. Our divorce nearly killed me.”

  Mason’s hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. “If you’ll recall, I never wanted the divorce. That was your idea. I just gave you what you wanted.”

  Annajane felt the bile rising in her throat, all the old pain stirred up again. “What I wanted was a marriage based on honesty, but that’s beside the point now. And it’s been so damned hard to make myself give up and move past all that, to move forward. But the things that ended our marriage were real. And as much as I care about you, I can’t go through all that again. There’s no going back.”

  “Annajane,” he started, then stopped, shook his head. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe nothing has changed. You didn’t trust me then; you won’t trust me now.”