“Not that it’s any of your business, but I’ve been celibate by choice for the past two years. I said I was into uncomplicated and stress-free, not reckless and irresponsible.” She finished her wine and set her empty glass down on the coffee table. “But you could probably get it.” His eyebrows shot up and she giggled. “Don’t act surprised, Frazier. I’ve been sending you signals all night. You’ve just been pretending not to get them.”
“Not pretending,” Frazier put in, holding up one long finger. “Just contemplating and evaluating.”
Her cell phone beeped and, instead of taking it out of her purse, she glanced at her watch. “That’s my taxi and it’s right on time. Now I know I’m not in Kansas anymore because I’d still be waiting if I were.” She stood, then picked up her purse from the coffee table and tucked it underneath her arm. “I, uh, guess I’ll leave you to your contemplating and evaluating...for now.”
Frazier rolled to his feet and towered over her five-foot-three frame. “That sounded like a threat,” he joked. “Should I be afraid?”
“No, that was more like a promise. Walk me downstairs?”
“Of course, just let me grab my keys from the other room.” With a hand on the small of Simone’s back, he ushered her out of the living room and into the foyer. “I’ll be right back.” On his way into his bedroom, his landline phone rang. The closest extension was in the kitchen, which was close to the door. “Would you mind getting that for me?” he called out as he disappeared into his bedroom.
A minute later, when he joined Simone in the foyer, she was shrugging into her coat.
“They hung up,” she told him. “But before they did, I could’ve sworn I heard heavy breathing.”
He caught the teasing glint in her eyes and chuckled. “You’re cute,” he said as he helped her into her coat.
“So are you, Frazier. So are you.”
They were out in the hallway, waiting for an elevator, when Simone said, “So, this relationship of yours—it’s really over?” The elevator arrived and they stepped inside. Frazier pressed a button for the lobby and slid his hands deep into his pants pockets.
“I think so, yes.”
In another week, two months would’ve passed since Wendy had left for Las Vegas. They spoke over the phone a couple times a week, but never about anything of importance and certainly never about where things stood between them. He knew that things were going great with the youth program, that she liked the weather in Las Vegas and that her tiny apartment was making her feel claustrophobic. But he didn’t know what she was thinking or feeling.
Did she miss him? Miss them? They had always been able to talk about anything and now they barely talked at all and, if there was one thing he regretted about crossing the line with her, it was that. He missed having her as a lover, but he missed her friendship even more.
At some point, he hoped they could regain at least some of what they’d shared before he screwed up everything, but with her in Las Vegas and him in St. Louis, that point couldn’t be now.
Wendy needed something that he was incapable of giving her, something that, until now, she’d been searching for, for years. As much as he’d wanted her to stay in St. Louis with him, she would’ve grown to resent him if he had asked that of her and that wasn’t what he wanted for either of them. He wanted her to be happy, even if it was without him. And, sooner or later, he was going to have to try to be happy, too.
Simone’s sultry voice crept into his thoughts. “Well, in that case, maybe we’ll see each other again soon.”
There it was again, an open invitation. If he wanted to, he could bring her back upstairs with him and they’d probably be in bed, all over each other, in fifteen minutes flat. He’d be lying if he said there wasn’t an attraction between them, that her sexiness didn’t arouse him on a couple of different levels. But he’d also be lying in all the ways that counted if he took one woman to bed while he was craving another one. He was a man. He could appreciate an attractive woman and Simone was definitely an attractive woman.
But she wasn’t Wendy.
“Maybe we will,” Frazier said, catching her eyes and returning her smile. He clasped her hand, released it and then watched her walk out of the building to meet her waiting taxi. As he rode the elevator back up to his floor, he wondered where Wendy was right now and what she was doing.
* * *
Pregnant?
Seriously?
It had to have happened the first time she and Frazier were intimate. It was the first and only time that they hadn’t used protection. But it only took one time, didn’t it? Now that she was thinking about it, spotting wasn’t quite the same as having a full-fledged cycle, but she’d been so caught up in work that she hadn’t thought to question the difference.
Until now.
Idiot!
Wendy was beyond incredulous. She was also scared and confused...and angrier than she had ever been in her entire life. If she really was pregnant, she didn’t know what the hell she was going to do. The timing couldn’t have been any worse if she had planned it that way and, besides that, she was nowhere near ready to be anyone’s parent at this stage in her life. And, really, did she even like children?
She stopped pacing a tread into the bathroom floor long enough for her shoulders to sag with guilt. What was she thinking? Of course, she liked children. Why wouldn’t she? That didn’t mean she wanted one, though. Maybe she’d thought about being a mother when she was a little girl, but now? Not so much.
After everything she’d been through in the aftermath of the accident, she finally had a shot at achieving some of her professional goals and this had to happen? God, if it weren’t for bad luck, she swore she’d have none at all.
She thought about diapers and formula and lack of sleep and the responsibility of it all and a rush of fear punched her in the gut, buckling her knees and forcing her into a seat on the edge of the bathtub.
She’d never had a pregnancy scare before and it was a strange feeling to find herself in the middle of one at thirty-three years old. Theoretically, it shouldn’t have been the end of the world. Actually, far from it. She was an adult, she was capable of supporting herself reasonably well, and she wasn’t exactly getting any younger. Even as a single parent, a child could do a lot worse than ending up with her as its mother.
But it was the end of the world.
Wendy didn’t quite know why it was the end of the world or exactly how, but the ball of anxiety sitting like lead in the pit of her stomach made the feeling very real.
Suddenly she was confused about everything—who she was, what she was doing, where she was going, how she was supposed to get there...everything.
There was a sliver of a chance that she was getting herself all worked up over nothing, but the thought wasn’t especially comforting at the moment, not when she still had hours of waiting ahead of her before she’d know anything definite. Tomorrow morning couldn’t get here fast enough and she was too upset to even think about trying to get some sleep between now and then.
Steeling herself to get through the rest of the night in one piece, Wendy dragged herself up from the edge of the bathtub and splashed cold water on her face at the sink. If she was pregnant, she’d have to deal with the consequences. But she couldn’t even begin to think about what those consequences might be until she knew for sure that life as she knew it was really over.
When Wendy finally did crawl into bed, her thoughts were back in St. Louis, with Frazier. She tried calling his cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail, so she dialed his home phone. After two rings, a woman answered...and Wendy lost her voice.
* * *
“Move...move...move!” Wendy’s walking stick tapped the floor rhythmically as she circled around the perimeter of the room, studying her students’ movement and technique. “Here’s your count...one-two
-three, one-two-three! Kick...kick...kick! Good! Now, shuffle to the left, Group A! Keep up, Kimberly!”
She couldn’t have asked for a more talented group of teenagers to work with and they were coming along quite nicely, but something was missing, something that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
“Group B, you should be moving to the front now! Faster! Nice job, Carlos! Here’s your count...two-four-six, two-four-six!” The stick kept tapping and she kept circling the room, but her mind was a million miles away.
After leaving the women’s clinic she’d gone to this morning, she had climbed into the back of a taxi and, instead of coming straight to work, asked the driver to take her on a scenic tour of the city.
They had driven past museums, through parks and residential communities and then along the Vegas Strip before the taxi had finally pulled up in front of the school and let her out. And she barely remembered any of it.
Her students were already in class, warming up, when she arrived and only a few of them seemed to notice that she was late. Or that she was even there, for that matter.
At home, her students would’ve pounced on her as soon as she walked into the room, demanding to know where she’d been and why they hadn’t known beforehand that she was going to be late. It would’ve turned into a whole big thing and half the class time would’ve been gone before they got around to the reason they were all there.
Here, though, her presence wasn’t so much necessary as it was complementary. The students she worked with in Las Vegas didn’t need her to be their confidant or their counselor, they didn’t laugh at her walking stick and they certainly didn’t care about her reasons for being late. They just needed her to help them learn how to dance.
“Okay,” Wendy called out when only five minutes of class time remained. “We’ll stop here today. Tomorrow we pick back up with pointe work, so remember to bring your pointe shoes, all right?” She paused to accommodate the round of muffled agreement that rose up in the air. “Good work, everyone. Be safe out there and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She waited until all of her students were gone to release the long, shaky breath that she’d been holding in all day. Walking on legs that suddenly felt like they were made of rubber, she went into the small office at the back of the classroom and closed the door behind her.
For the first time since early that morning, she was completely alone with her thoughts and the quiet wasn’t entirely welcome. It was the very thing she’d been avoiding all day and now she couldn’t escape it.
As if somehow connected to her thoughts, Wendy’s cell phone rang. She reached across the desk for it reluctantly and pressed a button to take the call when she saw that it was her mother calling.
“Hi, Mom,” she said, tucking the phone between her head and shoulder, and dropping into the chair behind the desk heavily. “How are you?”
“Never mind about me,” Selena said. “I don’t like the sound of your voice, Wendy. I think a better question would be, how are you? Is everything all right?”
Wendy didn’t know what it was about her mother’s concerned voice that brought everything back to the surface. Earlier, she’d used the time she spent riding around the city in a taxi to get her mind right and, until now, she thought she’d done a pretty good job of it.
Coming to terms with the results of her pregnancy test was harder than she’d thought it would be, but by the end of her two-hour-long tour, she was confident that she’d done it. Now she didn’t know what to think or to feel.
According to the doctor she’d seen that morning, her iron levels were low and she was moderately dehydrated, but she wasn’t pregnant.
She had sat in the examination room for several minutes after the doctor was gone, waiting for the news to settle in and happiness to take over. But it hadn’t. Instead, the news made her incredibly sad and she’d been feeling sick about it all day.
“Wendy, are you still there?”
She sucked in a shaky breath and squeezed her eyes shut against the tears welling up there. “Yes, Mom, I’m still here. I’m so glad you called.”
“So am I, baby. Now answer my question, please. Are you all right?”
Wendy opened her mouth to say something reassuring to her mother, something about how much she was enjoying her new job and the weather in Las Vegas, but a sob came out instead. She pressed her fingers to her lips to keep more sobs from slipping out. “No, Mom, I’m not all right,” she finally managed to get out. “Everything is a m-mess and its all m-my f-fault.”
“Okay,” Selena said cautiously, stretching the word out over three syllables. “Is this about Frazier? Because if it is—”
“Oh, my God, you cannot think that this is a good time to lecture me, can you?” She found a tissue and blew her nose noisily. “I can’t take a lecture right now, Mom.”
“No, sweetie,” her mother crooned softly. “I don’t think this is a good time to give you a lecture. Okay? Calm down. Tell me what I can do to help you pull yourself together. Whatever it is, you know I’ll do it.”
“That’s just it, Mom. Everything is coming together for me right now. My own dance studio is practically running itself and here I am in Las Vegas, working with the Greeley Dance Company. Do you have any idea how huge that is?”
There was a hint of impatience in Selena’s voice when she asked, “Then what’s the problem, Wendy? If it’s so huge, why are you crying? If you’re upset because Frazier has moved on and started dating...well...honey...what did you expect? He probably wants to give his mother grandchildren while he still can. I, on the other hand, should be so lucky.”
This was news. Bad news. “What? Why is he dating someone else?”
“I don’t know, Wendy. I suppose you’ll have to ask him yourself.”
She should’ve seen that little zinger coming. Her mother had never kept her feelings about Wendy’s and Frazier’s friendship secret. Left up to her, they would’ve been married years ago and working on their third child by now. “You’re not on my side at all, are you, Mom?”
“Of course, I’m on your side. I’m your mother, I love you. I just think your problem is—” Wendy’s long-suffering sigh was loud and heartfelt, but Selena was undeterred. “No, really, Wendy, hear me out now. I think your problem is that you’re confused about what you really want.”
“I refuse to choose between dancing and Frazier.” Just thinking about it made Wendy well up all over again. “I love them both.”
Now it was Selena’s turn to sigh long and hard. “Then why do you have to choose one or the other? You love dancing and you always have. You love Frazier and, believe it or not, you always have. The two of you have been dating since the day you met, you just didn’t know it. But, trust me, everyone else did. I’m glad you both waited until you were adults to finally consummate the relationship, because as much as I want grandchildren, I’m happy you didn’t give them to me while you were still in school. But, honey, do you know what you were doing all the time you were pseudodating Frazier? You were dancing, too. You’ve done both all these years, so why the hell can’t you figure out how to do both now? Why in the world do you have to choose one or the other? Why can’t you have both? Other women do it all the time. What makes you so special that you can’t?”
After a lifetime of lectures and screaming matches, Wendy understood that her mother’s questions weren’t just mostly rhetorical, they were entirely rhetorical. She’d learned a long time ago not to interrupt Selena Kincaid when she was on a roll, so she didn’t even think about going there this time. With Selena, if you stuck your neck out, she had no qualms about chopping it off.
“You know, sweetie, when your father and I met, I was a third-year lawyer and, even though I was still considered a newbie, I was already on my way to making associate partner. Then I fell in love with your father and I decided that I wanted to marry him
just as much as I wanted to be partner. So...you know what I did? Don’t answer that because I know you already do know what I did. If I hadn’t done it, you wouldn’t be here, would you? But I’m going to tell you again right now, because I don’t think you were truly old enough to appreciate it back then. Something tells me that you’ll appreciate it fully now, though. I got married, sweetie, and then I had you. Yes, I had to rearrange some things and I missed out on a lot of sleep, but that was mostly because you hardly slept the first three years of your life and I insisted on attending every one of those awful softball games your father used to play. I didn’t choose one or the other, because I didn’t have to. I wanted them both, so I figured out a way to have both and still make partner. Honey, you just have to ask yourself if you want it badly enough.” Several seconds of silence passed before Selena added, “Well, do you?”
Did she want it badly enough? Wendy honestly didn’t know. But what she did know was that, while the position with the Greeley Dance Company would look great on her résumé, there was no telling when she’d actually get around to updating the damn thing. She worked for herself and it wasn’t as if she was going to interview herself.
And, even though she liked the idea of working with students who had a natural affinity for dance because they were ready, willing and able to be molded, she couldn’t quite get over their elitist attitudes.
She liked Las Vegas well enough, but she missed her temperamental, street-smart kids, and she especially missed introducing them to their very first experience with the language of movement.
Then there was Frazier...
As if sensing her train of thought, her mother’s insistent voice broke into her thoughts to probe one last time. “Well, do you?”
She tried to muffle the sob that slipped out of her mouth, but Selena heard it, anyway.
“Oh, sweetie,” she cooed. “Don’t cry.”
The endearing tone, coming from her mother, touched Wendy’s heart in a way that only her mother’s words could, but if it was meant to comfort, it had the opposite effect. The second her mother beseeched her not to cry, that’s exactly what she did. She laid her head on the desktop and cried until she was empty.
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