“I’m sure you know a lot of interesting words,” I said. “Maybe you should go tell them to someone else.”
And before he could reply, I fled from the stairwell like an escapee from prison.
SOMEHOW I FOUND my way back to the modular theater, the sounds of dancing and laughter swirling around me. I was terrified by the realization of how much was wrong with me, that I couldn’t tolerate the normal act of having sex with a man I was attracted to. And I was humiliated by the way I had just behaved. Hardy had no choice but to think I was a bitch, a cocktease. He would never want anything to do with me again. That thought sort of relieved me, but at the same time I wanted to burst into tears.
Todd found me immediately. He had been talking with a guy at the bar, his gaze leisurely sweeping the room, when he saw me come in. He came to me, his gaze focused on my pale face and kiss-swollen lips. “You look like you just banged the Dallas Cowboys,” he said. “First and second strings.”
“Please, can you call me a cab?” I whispered.
Concern warmed his blue-green eyes. “I’ll take you home, sweetheart. Here, lean on me.”
But I flinched as he tried to put his arm around my shoulders.
“All right,” Todd continued pleasantly, as if he hadn’t noticed my bizarre reaction, “why don’t you take my arm, and we’ll go out the side door?”
He drove me to 1800 Main in his BMW Coupe, asking no questions, maintaining a comfortable silence until we finally got to my seventh-floor apartment. He had decorated it with an eclectic mix of antique-shop furniture and a couple of his own cast-off pieces. Creams and whites were balanced by dark distressed wood. And Todd had added a few touches of whimsy, like covering the inside-facing panel of my front door with an antique bamboo hula-girl screen.
Taking one look at my wretched face, Todd reached for the green chenille throw on my sofa and wrapped it around me. I snuggled in the corner of the sofa, drawing my feet back to make room for him.
“Must have been some dance,” Todd said, untying his bow tie. He left it hanging loose on either side of his neck, and relaxed on the sofa beside me, as graceful as a cat. “What happened?”
“We didn’t dance,” I said numbly.
“Oh?”
“He took me to a dark corner somewhere. A stairwell.”
“Purely for my vicarious enjoyment, tell me . . . is he good?”
I could feel my face go crimson.
“That good?” Todd asked.
A shaky laugh escaped me. I wasn’t sure I could put it into words. “You know how when someone kisses you, you can tell they’re only doing it as a step to something else? Like they’re just trying to get it over with? Well, Hardy kisses like it’s the only thing in the world he wants to do. Each kiss is like a complete sex act.” I closed my eyes for a second, remembering. “And he’s a face-holder.”
“Mmmn. I love that. So did one of your brothers find you?”
“No, it was me. I screwed it all up. I freaked out in the middle of it.”
There was a long silence. “Freaked out how? What do you . . . Haven, take your hands down and look at me. This is Todd. Just say it.”
“I got scared. More than scared. I pushed him away and ran out of there as fast as I could.”
“Scared by what?”
“I felt his . . . you know, his . . .”
Todd gave me a sardonic glance as I hesitated. “Hard-on?” he suggested. “Package? Lap-taffy? Bait-and-tackle? Come on, Haven, let’s not talk about this like a pair of tweenies.”
I scowled defensively. “My conversations don’t usually include the subject of erections.”
“Too bad,” he said. “All the best conversations do. Go on, sweetheart.”
I took a deep breath. “While we were kissing, I felt his erection, and all the desire just disappeared. Poof. After what I went through with Nick, the feel of that has a lot of bad connotations for me.”
“Went through what?” he asked quietly. “You’ve never told me. Although I’ve had my suspicions.”
“The night I left Nick”—I looked away from Todd as I made myself say it—“we had rough sex.”
“Rough sex?” Todd asked. “Or rape?”
“I don’t know.” I was drowning in shame. “I mean, we were married. But I didn’t want to do it, and he forced me, so I guess—”
“It was rape,” he said flatly. “It doesn’t matter if you’re married or not. If you don’t want to do it and someone forces you, it’s rape. Holy shit, I’d like to kill the bastard.” Todd’s face was dark with a fury I’d never seen in him before. But as he stared at me, his expression changed. “Haven, sweetheart . . . you know if a woman’s ready, aroused, it’s not going to hurt. Especially if the man knows what he’s doing, which I have no doubt Hardy does.”
“Yes, but even though my mind knows it, my body doesn’t. So as soon as I felt that huge thing pressing against me, I couldn’t stop myself from going into a blind panic. I felt positively nauseous. God.” I wrapped myself tighter in the green chenille as if it were a cocoon.
“Haven’t you talked about this stuff with the therapist yet?”
I shook my head. “We’re still working on my boundary issues. And she’s on vacation for the next two weeks, so I’ll have to wait until she’s back to help me deal with this.”
“Sex isn’t a boundary issue?”
I frowned at him. “I’ve had a lot more important things to worry about than sex.”
Todd opened his mouth to reply, appeared to think better of it, and closed it again. After a moment he said, “So just when things were getting hot, you told Hardy to stop.”
“Yeah.” I rested my chin on my bent knees. “And I . . . I wasn’t very nice about it.”
“What did he say? What was his reaction?”
“He didn’t say much of anything. But I could tell he was pissed.”
“Well, yeah, guys tend to get pretty frustrated when they’re hung out to dry, sexually speaking. But the point is, Hardy didn’t hurt you, right? He didn’t try to make you do something you didn’t want?”
“No.”
“I’d say that means you’re pretty safe with him.”
“I didn’t feel safe.”
“I think at this point, safety isn’t a feeling, it’s a process. Starting with trust. Why don’t you try telling Hardy some of things you’ve told me?”
“He won’t be able to handle it. I know he won’t. He’ll be headed for the exit door before I can even finish telling him what a basket case I am.”
“You’re not a basket case,” Todd said calmly, “and he’s no fucking wimp, Haven. I think the reason you’re drawn to him is that deep down you know he can handle anything you could throw at him.”
“But what if he doesn’t want to?”
“Here are your options: you can give him a chance to cowboy up, or you can walk away without ever finding out. And then you’ll have to face this same deal with the next guy you’re attracted to.”
“Or . . .”
“Or what?”
I moistened my lips nervously. “I could practice with you first.”
I had never seen Todd at a loss for words before. But his eyes widened, and his mouth opened and closed, fishlike, for at least ten seconds. “You’re asking me to go to bed with you?” he finally managed to ask.
I nodded. “If I’m going to freak out or throw up in the middle of it, I’d rather it be with you. And if I can manage to get through it with you, I’ll know I can do it with Hardy.”
“Oh, shit.” Todd started to laugh helplessly, grabbing my hand and kissing the palm. “Sweetheart. Haven. No.” He kept my hand, laying his cheek gently against my palm. “I would love to help you through this, little friend, and I’m totally honored that you asked. But right now you don’t want a fuck-buddy. You want a hell of a lot more than that. And somewhere, not far from here, there’s a big, blue-eyed roughneck who’s dying to show you a good time in bed. If I were you, I’d give him a tr
y.” I felt his smile press against the edge of my hand as he added, “If you can get past him being so ugly and scrawny, that is.”
When he released my hand, I closed my fingers around my palm as if his kiss were a lucky penny. “Todd, when you danced with Liberty . . . did she say anything about Hardy?”
He nodded. “She told me in spite of that thing that went down with Gage’s business deal, she doesn’t see any danger in you and Hardy being interested in each other. Based on what she knows about him from the time they both lived in that little craphole town—”
“Welcome.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Todd was not a fan of small-town living. “Based on that, Liberty doesn’t think he’d hurt you. She said Hardy had always gone out of his way to keep from leading her on, and he’d done what he could to help her. In fact, she thinks the two of you might even do each other some good.”
“I can’t imagine how,” I said glumly, “when I can’t manage to be around his erection without freaking.”
Todd smiled. “A relationship is about more than just an erection. Although, if you ask me . . . wondering what to do with one is a nice problem to have.”
AFTER TODD HAD left I took a long bath, pulled on a pair of flannel pajamas, and poured myself a glass of wine. I wondered where Hardy was at that moment, if he had stayed at the theater after I’d left.
The temptation to call him was nearly overwhelming, but I wasn’t certain what I wanted to say, how much I could bring myself to explain.
I resumed my place in the corner of the sofa, staring at the phone in its cradle. I wanted to hear Hardy’s voice. I thought of those fevered minutes in the stairwell before I’d gotten afraid, when his hands and mouth had been all over me, slow and searching and tender . . . so good. So unbelievably good—
The phone rang.
Jolted, I set aside the wine, almost spilling it in my haste. I snatched up the phone and answered in breathless relief. “Hello?”
But the voice was not Hardy’s.
“Hi, Marie.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
NICK.” I FELT AS IF ICE CRYSTALS HAD FORMED IN my veins. “How did you get my number? What do you want?”
“Just to know how you’re doing.”
His voice was so familiar. The sound of it vaporized the past several months as if they had all been a dream. If I closed my eyes, I could almost believe I was back in the Dallas apartment and he would be coming back from work soon.
So I kept my eyes open, as if one blink would result in death. I stared at the weave of the cream sofa slipcover until each individual thread came into distinct focus. “I’m great,” I said. “How about you?”
“Not great.” A lengthy pause. “Still trying to make myself believe it’s really over. I miss you, Marie.”
He sounded contemplative. Something in his voice drew out a dark, seeping guilt from my heart.
“It’s Haven,” I said. “I don’t answer to Marie anymore.”
I thought that would provoke him, but he stunned me by saying, “Okay, Haven.”
“Why are you calling?” I asked abruptly. “What do you want?”
“Just to talk for a minute.” Nick sounded resigned and a little wry. “Are we still allowed to talk?”
“I guess so.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think. I want you to understand something . . . I never meant for things to get out of hand the way they did.”
I gripped the phone so hard I was vaguely surprised the plastic didn’t crack. I believed him. I had never thought Nick had wanted or planned to be the way he was. There were things in his background, his childhood, that had made him a damaged person. A victim, as surely as I had been.
But that didn’t mean he was off the hook for the harm he’d done me.
I was filled with regret for what we’d lost . . . and what we’d never had. I felt sick and weary.
“Do you hate me, Haven?” Nick asked softly.
“No. I hate what you did.”
“I hate what I did too.” He sighed. “I keep thinking . . . if we’d had more time together, if we could have been allowed to work out our problems instead of having your brother come in and push that divorce through so fucking fast . . .”
“You hurt me, Nick,” was all I could say.
“You hurt me too. You lied to me all the time, about little things, big things . . . you always shut me out.”
“I didn’t know how else to handle you. The truth made you angry.”
“I know. But it takes two people to make a good marriage. And I had a lot to deal with—being rejected by your family, having to work like a dog to provide for you—and you always blamed me for not being able to solve your problems.”
“No,” I protested. “Maybe you blamed yourself. But I never felt like that.”
“You were never really with me. Even when we slept together. I could tell you were never really into it. No matter what I did, you never responded to me the way other women did. I kept hoping you’d get better.”
Damn it, Nick knew how to get to me, how to reawaken the sense of inadequacy I’d struggled so hard to overcome. Nick knew things about me that no one else did. We would always be linked by our shared failure—it was part of our individual identities. It could never be erased.
“Are you dating anyone now?” I heard him ask.
“I don’t feel comfortable talking about that with you.”
“That means yes. Who is he?”
“I’m not dating anyone,” I said. “I haven’t slept with anyone. You don’t have to believe that, but it’s true.” Instantly I despised myself for saying it, and for feeling that I was still accountable to him.
“I believe you,” Nick said. “Aren’t you going to ask about me?”
“No. I don’t care if you’re dating anyone. It’s not my business.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I’m glad you’re okay, Haven. I still love you.”
That brought tears to my eyes. I was so glad he couldn’t see them. “I’d rather you didn’t call me again, Nick.”
“I still love you,” he repeated, and hung up.
Slowly I replaced the phone in the receiver, and blotted the tears by doing a deliberate face-plant into the sofa. I stayed that way until I started to smother, and then I lifted my head and sucked in a deep breath.
“I thought I loved you,” I said aloud, even though Nick couldn’t hear me.
But I hadn’t known what love was. And I wondered how you could ever be sure, when you thought you loved someone, if you really did.
The next day, it rained.
During the occasional droughts, Houston got so dry that, as a local joke went, “the trees are bribing the dogs.” But when it rained, it rained. And as a virtually flat city built around bayous, Houston had major drainage issues. During a heavy downpour, water collected high in the streets and flowed into storm drains, culverts, and bayous that directed the flow to the Gulf of Mexico. In the past, countless people had been killed by flash flooding, their cars overturned or swept away as they tried to cross the rising water. Sometimes flooding ruptured fuel pipelines, sewer lines, knocked out bridges, and made major roads inaccessible.
A flood watch was announced after lunchtime, and later it was changed to an actual warning. Everyone took it in stride, since Houston residents were accustomed to flash flooding and generally knew which streets to avoid during the evening commute.
Late in the day I went to a meeting at Buffalo Tower to discuss a new online system for processing maintenance requests. Vanessa had originally planned to go to the meeting, but she had changed her mind at the last minute and sent me instead. She told me it was mostly an information-gathering meeting, and she had more important things to do than talk about software. “Find out everything about the system,” she told me, “and I’ll have some questions for you in the morning.” I was pretty sure there would be hell to pay if Vanessa had a question I couldn’t answer. So I resolved to find out every last detail about the s
oftware program, short of memorizing the source codes.
I was relieved but puzzled that Vanessa had not mentioned one word about seeing me at the Harrisburg the previous night. And she didn’t ask about Hardy. I tried to read her mood, but that was like trying to predict the weather, an iffy proposition at best. Hopefully she had decided to consider the subject as something beneath her notice.
Even though Buffalo Tower was only a few blocks from 1800 Main, I drove because the rain was coming down in sheets. The building was one of the older skyscrapers, a gabled red granite structure that reminded me of a 1920s-style building.
As I parked in one of the lower levels of the underground garage, I checked my phone messages. Hardy had called, I saw, and my stomach tightened. I pushed a button to hear his message.
“Hey.” His tone was brusque. “We need to talk about last night. Give me a call when you get off work.”
That was all. I listened to the message again, and I wished I could cancel the meeting and go to him right then. But it wouldn’t take long—I would get through it as quickly as possible, and then I would call him.
By the time the software consultant, Kelly Reinhart, and I had finished, it was a few minutes past six. It might have gone on even longer, except there was a call from the security office to tell us that there had been some flooding in the lowest level of the garage. It was mostly unoccupied, since most people had already left for the day, but there were still one or two cars down there, and they should probably be moved.
“Shoot, one of them’s mine,” I said to Kelly, closing my laptop and sliding it into my briefcase. “I’d better go see to my car. Is it okay if I call you tomorrow about the last couple of points we didn’t get to?”
“Sure thing,” Kelly said.
“What about you? . . . Are you going to the garage too?”
“I didn’t bring my car today, it’s in the shop. My husband’s picking me up at six-thirty. But I’ll ride down with you in the elevator if you want company—”