Asking for Trouble

by Mary Kay McComas

  “Very casual.” Hardly worth dressing for at all, he added mentally, recognizing the smoky look in her eyes.

  “Ah ... well, all right, then,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’ll only be a few minutes. Can I ... get you anything?”

  “Not right now, thanks,” he answered, wanting her to feel comfortable and relaxed before he attacked her and drove her to distraction with his love. Need stirred in his loins as he recalled her metamorphosis from a refined, self-contained young accountant to an untamed, unfettered, and totally unselfish woman the night before.

  She turned to leave, then stopped. “Do I? Snore?”

  He looked at her and smiled a gentle smile. “No,” he said with a shake of his head. “But do you have any idea of what you look like when you’re sleeping?”

  She was afraid to ask.

  “No. What?”

  “You look like an angel. Sort of pure and innocent. Untouched and untouchable,” he said, a tenderness in his eyes. He hesitated briefly and then added, “I kept thinking that if I’d wanted to, I could have made enough noise to wake you up. But I just sat there ... watching over you ... guarding you.”

  Sydney was too moved to speak. She hadn’t really thought about it until that moment, but no man had ever expressed a desire to protect her from anything before—except for her father, of course. Maybe being a smart and self-sufficient career woman led men to believe that she was invulnerable. And to be truthful, she wasn’t defenseless. She’d taken care of herself for quite some time and was very capable of continuing to do so. But she felt a warm, secure feeling in her chest, knowing that Tom wanted to protect her.

  She smiled at him, and a moment of silent communication passed between them. He seemed to understand that although she didn’t need or want him to shelter her from the world, she was glad he wanted to. And he expressed to her that he was someone she could count on if she ever changed her mind.

  Lord, the man was getting easier to love all the time. Impulsively she reached out and pressed her palm to his cheek. Where did men as dear and sweet as Tom Ghorman come from? she wondered as she engraved the fine angles and lines of his handsome face and the precise blue of his eyes in her heart.

  He covered her hand with his and kissed it. Raw sexual need gripped her low in her abdomen, and her heart fluttered with yearning.

  “We could skip the date and go straight to bed,” he said, leaving no question as to his frame of mind.

  She nodded, but said, “It won’t take me long to get ready to go.”

  Great sex was nothing to base a relationship on, she reminded herself as she finished her toilette with a light coat of lipstick. It wasn’t something to spit at, but it wasn’t everything. Of course, sex with Tom wouldn’t be great if Tom weren’t Tom. He was everything. She smiled wistfully.

  Then her smile drooped. He was everything, including a mortician.

  Everyone had faults and flaws. Why couldn’t Tom’s flaw have been golf? Or laziness? Or a tendency to leave caps off bottles and toothpaste tubes? Why couldn’t he have been a plumber or a hair stylist, or worse yet, another accountant? Why a mortician, of all things? she wondered, opening the bedroom door.

  There was a low, glowing light in the middle of the floor, the rest of the room looked dark and empty. She heard music and could smell ... bread?

  “Tom?”

  “Turn out the light and come over here,” she heard him say from somewhere near the glowing light. She obeyed automatically, her curiosity piqued. “Careful. Watch those bushes there.”

  “What bushes?” She tripped over a footstool and fell against a chair that wasn’t where she had left it.

  “Those bushes. Are you all right?”

  She laughed. “Where am I?”

  “On a grassy bluff overlooking the beach a few miles from my house. It’s very romantic here, and you’re in the mood to be seduced.”

  When her eyes adjusted to the light, she could see him on the floor, lying on his side next to what appeared to be one of her lamp shades with a flashlight burning inside of it. Stretching her imagination, she could envision it as a small campfire.

  “Do you seduce all your women here?” she asked, sitting Indian style on the floor across from him.

  “No. I come here a lot, to think usually. But I’ve never brought a woman with me before.”

  “Is that a picnic basket?” she asked.

  “Yep. Are you hungry?” He sat up and lifted the lid of the basket. “I brought fresh bread and cheese and fruit and my favorite wine. What would you like?”

  “Some bread and cheese and fruit and wine, please.”

  “Coming right up.”

  What ensued wasn’t like any picnic Sydney had ever been on before. It was more of a covenant ceremony as they relaxed beside the fire, talking and feeding each other small pieces of food. Head to head, they stretched out on the floor in opposite directions and discussed everything that fluttered through their minds. They wooed each other with the soft tones of their voices, enticed with their eyes, and tempted with gentle touches.

  When they made love, it was slow and rapturous. Every caress had a meaning. Every look was significant. They culminated their lovemaking with a silent solemn vow of devotion.

  “Sydney?” Tom spoke softly into the near darkness.

  “Mm?” she answered, nearly asleep in the warmth and comfort of his arms, wrapped close to him in the afghan he’d taken from the couch.

  “I love you.”

  Her hesitation was marginal, a split-second search of her soul.

  “I love you too,” she said without a doubt.

  There were no further words necessary. And for the next week, no challenge arose to test them. They were inseparable except for their work hours during which they made frequent calls simply to hear the other’s voice.

  “We had swings and chinning bars when I was a kid,” Tom said, his voice ringing and echoing as if they were in a cathedral. They were facing each other with their legs braced against the opposite wall of a large concrete tube centrally located in the park a few blocks from Sydney’s apartment building. “We never had anything like this.”

  “I wonder why we didn’t,” she mused aloud “This isn’t high-tech or complicated. It’s a sewer pipe, isn’t it? How come we didn’t have these?”

  “TV was fairly new back then, and they didn’t know all the harm it could do, I guess. Now parents have to use their imaginations to figure out ways to keep kids occupied.”

  “Aren’t these the same imaginations that were destroyed in a whole generation of children who sat in front of the television watching The Mickey Mouse Club and American Bandstand?”

  “Yep. The very same.”

  She crawled out of the tube, saying, “Extremists make me really nervous. Moderation is what I’m going to teach my children. TV is okay if they can read and ride their bike and roller skate and swim too.”

  “Moderation is good,” he agreed, getting to his feet. “But how about supervised moderation?”

  “Well, sure. Kids don’t know what’s good or bad for them until they’re taught.” Curious, she asked, “Do you want a large or small family?”

  “Large.”

  “How large?”

  “Six or eight?”

  “Children?” she asked, agog.

  “Too many?” he asked, a bit concerned.

  Sydney sat in a swing and replayed the vision of her dream family in the back of her mind. She and Tom stood on the deck of the beach house watching the two children playing in the surf. Suddenly a third child in white swimming trunks joined the other two in the sand, and a fourth child, dressed in a white pinafore, came to stand in the billowing folds of her white sundress. Her arm slipped around the little girl’s shoulders. She held her close and sighed.

  “That’s more than I’d planned on,” she said to Tom, still basking in the tranquility of her dream. “But I think I can see my way to managing a couple more.”

  “Soon?” He pulled
the swing back and pushed her high into the air. He smiled when it occurred to him that she’d accepted being the mother of his children without qualm or question.

  “How soon?” she asked, looking back over her shoulder at him.

  “I could start tonight.” He gave her another push and a suggestive grin. “Right now as a matter of fact.”

  She laughed. “You’re that anxious to be a daddy?”

  “I’m ready. Now all I have to ...” His words trailed off as a police car rounded the corner and came to a slow stop in the middle of the street. The men inside eyed the overgrown children in the park suspiciously and pulled the car over to the curb.

  “You folks got business here?” one of the officers asked. “There’s a curfew posted on this park, you know.”

  “Ah, no, we didn’t know,” Tom called back, helping Sydney to stop her swing. “We were just out walking around.”

  “We’ll leave,” Sydney added, her last encounter with the police department still fresh in her mind.

  “They didn’t have curfews on parks either, when we were kids,” Tom muttered as they walked away.

  “Things are different now,” she said, contemplating all the evils that befell children now, that she had never dreamed existed when she was a child. “I want our children to know they’re loved and to feel secure.”

  “They will,” he said, pulling her close to his side. “They’ll feel it in us and grow strong in knowing that they’re part of us.”

  She looked at him, and under the streetlights she could see the promise in his eyes. Tom made everything seem right and certain. He had a way of changing the appearance of things. Events that had once looked huge and ominous became simple and as uncomplicated as a walk in the park. He did the most ordinary things in the most romantic of fashions, and what was truly romantic took on a sanctity that was almost spiritual.

  “Oh, barf,” Judy said a few nights later, groaning in mock disgust. “Watching the two of you make goo-goo eyes over linguini is enough to make a body want to throw up.”

  Sydney tried to look insulted.

  “Goo-goo eyes indeed,” she said, glancing at Tom. “Were we making goo-goo eyes at each other?”

  “Well, actually, you were making goo-goo eyes at me. I was just sitting here, eating my linguini and trying to ignore you.”

  She sputtered indignantly, giggled, and then sputtered again. He winked at Judy.

  “I love it when she’s flustered,” he said, the loving look in his eyes as he gazed at Sydney bearing a strong resemblance to the aforementioned goo-goo eyes.

  “I suppose men don’t make goo-goo eyes?” Judy said. “And of course, they never get flustered.”

  “Not real men,” he told her, his eyes twinkling as he watched Sydney pick up several dishes from the table and remove them to the kitchen.

  “I told you he was impossible,” she said over her shoulder to Judy.

  Her friend made a remark at which Tom laughed, but Sydney didn’t hear it. She was too busy taking note of the warm feelings in her chest. Happy feelings. Contentment. And she was glad she could share some of them with Judy.

  So often, female friends were split apart when one or the other fell in love. When one’s attention was suddenly diverted elsewhere, the other often felt abandoned and left out—no matter how glad they were that their friend had found happiness. Not so with Judy.

  Judy and Tom had formed a different sort of relationship, almost from their first meeting. They saw in each other the qualities Sydney liked best in them and had become friends. They kept a steady stream of teasing banter flowing whenever they happened to meet and seemed to accept the other’s presence in Sydney’s affections.

  Sydney was well aware that now, at last, she had it all. A loving family, good friends, and Tom. And she didn’t need a holiday to remind her that she had a lot to be grateful for, she thought, listening to the voices in the next room.

  “You know, it’s hard to believe you’re a ... ah ... you know,” she heard Judy saying.

  “A what?” Tom asked. “A man or a mortician?”

  Sydney could almost feel the glances that were being sent her way and quickly busied her hands, pretending not to have heard.

  “A mortician,” Judy said in a low voice, knowing her friend hadn’t as yet resolved her feelings about Tom’s job.

  They’d carefully avoided mentioning Tom’s profession in conversations during the past week. This was the first reference they’d made to it since the night on his boat. Strange, she thought absently, she’d almost forgotten what he was.

  “What’s so hard to believe?” he asked, not bothering to lower his voice or hide the topic of their discussion. “Morticians are no different from anyone else. We get up in the morning, go to work—we sometimes work odd hours, but then so do cops and doctors and factory workers. We go home to our families, pay taxes, watch football on television. We even have our own jokes.”

  “Mortician jokes?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Want to hear one?”

  “Of course.”

  “A mortician in San Francisco was driving up this hill with a coffin in the back of his hearse. He hit a bump, and the rear door flew open ...”

  Tom went on as a chilling fog settled around the warm feeling in Sydney’s chest. A curious sense of annoyance filtered into her consciousness, disturbing the contentment and kinship she’d felt moments earlier. Quite unnaturally, she wished Judy would go away.

  She sighed. It wasn’t Judy, she decided on second thought. It wasn’t Judy’s fault that she could talk so freely with Tom about his profession. It was her own fault that she couldn’t be open and candid about it, that he hadn’t told her any of his mortician jokes.

  “... he chases the coffin down the hill, through two sets of traffic lights, and through the front door of a pharmacy.”

  She sighed again. It would always be there, the gulf between his profession and her phobia. How long would they be able to live with their heads in the clouds, never talking about it, never sharing what one of them did with eight to ten hours of his day? Her heart tore painfully as she admitted the truth.

  “... he chased the coffin past the perfume counter and the soda fountain to the back of the store, and then he saw the pharmacist and stopped. He was huffing and puffing and wheezing when he looked at the man and said, ‘You got anything to stop this coffin?’“

  Tom guffawed, and Judy groaned as Sydney’s heart broke into a million unmendable pieces.

  “No more,” Judy insisted, hanging up the telephone with the force of her decision. “The next time that thing rings, you answer it. I won’t tell him you’re not here, when he knows as well as I do that you’re sitting less than two feet away.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sydney said, knowing the shame her friend felt at having to lie repeatedly whenever Tom called. Her own guilt was twofold. Not only was she being unfair and hurtful to Tom, she was embroiling her friend in a situation she should have taken care of days before.

  “Dammit, Sydney,” Tom’d said over the phone the day after their linguini dinner. “What the hell is going on here? So far you’ve come up with every flimsy excuse in the book not to see me again.”

  “It’s not a flimsy excuse. I need time to think, and I can’t think straight when you’re around.”

  “That’s the only time you do think straight,” he argued. “When you’re alone you get sidetracked from the real issues. You get confused and filled with doubt.” He paused. “I want equal time.”

  “Equal time for what?”

  “To convince you not to give up on us. That I’m right for you. To show you that we belong together.”

  Sydney was silent. She knew she should make a clean break, tell him it was over and be finished with it.

  But how could she tell him that she wouldn’t see him again, when her blundering heart was still enthralled with planning and building a life with Tom? Where were the words to convince him that what she thought to be the truth and what
she wanted were one and the same? She knew she was hurting him, that she wasn’t being fair, and that she was acting like a coward, but how could she tell him without choking on her own breath? Could she be absolutely certain she was making the right decision? Could she live with the finality of it? She couldn’t. She knew she should, but she couldn’t.

  “I’ve never been so glad to see Monday in all my life,” Judy continued to rant, more than a little angry with Sydney’s behavior. “Now your receptionist’ll have to lie for you all day and I can start looking at myself in the mirror again.”

  “I said I was sorry,” she said, weakly. “I’ll ... I’ll tell him. You won’t have to lie to him anymore.”

  “When?”

  “Today?”

  “Today,” Judy said firmly. And then, as a friend, she put her arm around Sydney’s shoulder. “You’ve got a good heart, my friend. Listen to it,” she said.

  “It’s in love. It’s not listening to me.” She laid her head on Judy’s shoulder, hoping to tap into her calm logic. Hers was at an all-time low. “I feed it facts and tell it that Tom’s not healthy for us, and it keeps saying, ‘I love him.’”

  Judy laughed. “Well, it appears to feel very strongly that it’s right. Perhaps you should give its point of view some more consideration.”

  Sydney lifted her head and gave her a half smile. Judy was trying to be helpful, but it wasn’t as simple as she kept trying to make it. Judy knew about her phobia; she knew about Tom’s profession. As a rule, she was pretty quick to catch on to things, but at present she was lingering in her idealistic idea that love conquers all. Sydney knew better.

  “You’d better get going, or you’ll be late for work,” she said, knowing that any further discussion about Tom would be useless.

  “Look who’s talking. You’re not even dressed yet.” Judy turned and looked back at Sydney from the door. “Maybe your heart knows something you haven’t thought of yet.”

  “Like what? I’ve been over and through this so many times, I can’t see straight anymore.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” she said, and grinned. “And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe your head’s been so busy worrying, it hasn’t had time to figure out what your heart already knows.”