“Don’t worry. I know what you’re thinking.” He opened the sheet and gave me a quick peek. Yep, that would be his tighty-whities.
“What happened?” I stretched my mouth, trying to shake the feeling of fuzz on my tongue.
“Well, for starters, you’re a complete lightweight when it comes to alcohol. You should know that.” His brow furrowed. “I found you on the kitchen counter, singing to some dude playing a guitar.”
I grabbed my mouth. “No way.”
“Yes way. That’s when I threw you over my shoulder and carried you to the Jeep. It’s a good thing you didn’t puke in it. You waited until we got back here.”
I rubbed my aching head. It was pounding. “Was I at least singing well? Like, were there people enjoying it?”
“Amy!”
“I know, I know. That’s not the point. It’s just that I’ve always wanted to be a singer.”
“What?” His head jutted forward, his face contorted in disbelief.
“What?” I asked with a hint of innocence. “I’ve never told anyone.”
“Obviously. You don’t even sing in the car.”
“That’s because I don’t know the words to Def Leppard songs.”
“Point taken.”
I searched the blank walls for some type of recollection of the night before. It figures I was probably having fun, yet can’t remember a snippet from it. Although, now that I think about it, I did remember the guitar. Yes, there was a song I liked and then I recalled holding something, pretending it was a microphone. A longneck beer bottle? Oh my gosh, I could never see these people again. Not that that was something I feared. Half were still in college, I presumed.
“Care to tell me about the tattoo?”
I edged up on the pillow. “Care to tell me how I got this way?”
“Well, it turns out not only are you a lightweight, but a volatile little drunk. You must’ve hit me a dozen times trying to get you out of the clothes you’d puked on.”
Yes, it was all coming to me. I remembered someone pulling at my clothes. But I thought I was in a band. What? That was Wesley pulling me off stage, er, the kitchen counter?
“I wasn’t about to endure the hits in trying to get your pajamas on. I just left you to sleep in your underwear.”
My lips pouted. “I’m sorry I hit you.”
“That’s quite all right. Now, back to your pretty little Wonder Woman stamp.” His eyebrows lifted.
“Why? Were you looking? I thought you were dressing me for bed, not performing an inspection.”
“I couldn’t help it. It’s right there.” He pointed to the sheet.
“It’s my alter ego.” I said it high and mighty-like, a little snoot of my nose turned upward.
He laughed. “Wonder Woman?”
“Yes. Now stop laughing.” I pulled the sheet higher, wishing he’d never seen it. That was my secret weapon. My empowering insignia.
He covered his mouth and used those pleading eyes again. “When did you get it?”
“After we split up.” I tried to be vague.
“Obviously. I didn’t know you had it in you to do something so…outrageous.”
“Well, if you must know, my friend and I did it together.”
“Oh Lord, don’t tell me you and the doc did it. What, did he get Captain America? Are you going to be linked to this guy forever, with matching superpowers?”
“No, it wasn’t Mark, thank you very much.”
He was puzzled. “Who then? The last time you went out with someone from your work it was that girl with all the makeup. Don’t tell me it was her. I don’t know what you have in common with her. She probably has them all over her body. Did you think it was cool or something? I bet you’re regretting it now.”
“For your information, it was not Sonja. And no, she does not have tattoos. Although she would think it was cool that I did.” I tried to straighten up in the bed. “You don’t know him.” I wiggled my legs. If I were clothed, I would’ve gone to the bathroom and avoided this little interrogation. Now I needed to wait for him to turn his head. He didn’t have the privilege anymore to see me.
He sat up, too. “Him? Who? Amy, tell me.” His tone changed to husband-like.
“Tom. Now look away so I can go to the bathroom. My bladder is aching over here.”
He cocked his head. “Are you serious?”
“Yes, Wesley. I have friends you don’t know.” I put a leg out of the bed.
“No, about me turning my head. Amy, you’re my wife.”
“Only technically. Now, please.” I pointed to the wall.
With pinched lips and flared nostrils, he turned.
I ran to the bathroom, squeezing my legs as tightly as possible.
I made it and boy, did I have a gallon to release. Chill bumps sprung up on my arms and legs as I washed my hands. I looked around and to my disappointment, there was no towel and no robes hanging on the hook. I’d have to go out again in the buff. I turned my body slightly and saw my body art, thinking back on that day. Thinking about Tom. I felt bad for not calling and telling him where I was. I hoped he was still planning to go to his friend’s house for dinner. I hated thinking about him home alone for Thanksgiving.
“I need to come out and get my clothes, Wesley,” I called from behind the bathroom door.
Suddenly he appeared, like from a cloud of smoke. I had no time to react. He had conveniently left his clothes behind. We stood there, staring at each other—Adam and Eve in underwear. It would’ve been awkward to hide behind the door. But when his eyes crept down the entirety of my body with the speed of dried-up syrup being forced from a bottle, I froze. Like shallow-breathing froze. This was new for us.
“You’re beautiful.” He finally found a resting place for his eyeballs, looking directly into mine.
I crossed my arms in front of my chest. I wasn’t sure whether it was this moment that was making my stomach turn, or the fact my liver was still sifting through whatever I drank the night before.
“Wesley, what are you doing? I need my clothes.” I tried to get by him, but he touched my arm. A spark of electricity buzzed.
“Amy, this time I want things to be different between us.” He lowered his stance to penetrate his stare in my eyes. “I want to be able to look at you, to touch you, to make love in the daylight. I want…”
“Wesley.” I backed up into the doorframe. “I never said we were getting back together.”
I needed to slow down this runaway train. All the talk about touching, looking, making you-know-what in the you-know-where. It was freaking me out. What happened to this man? It was like he went off to war, aka Violet, and came back a changed man. What on earth happened while he was with her? Never mind; I didn’t want to know. I didn’t even want a hint.
“What would be the reason we wouldn’t? I’m alone. You’re going to be alone now. The doc’s going away, you have no apartment…the only solution would be for us to get back together.”
Okay, having this conversation after a night of binge drinking was one thing. Having this conversation at all was another. But having this conversation while half-naked was all too much. I needed a barrier of clothing, and fast.
I slipped out of his hold and ran to my suitcase. I pulled out a fresh pair of panties and my outfit for the day. After a shower and a mask of clothing, I’d be ready to talk. Maybe.
“I have to shower, Wesley. Is there any way you can use the bathroom in the hall while I get ready? We’ll have to talk about this when we leave. Margaret is probably waiting for help with the meal.”
“Amy.” He touched my hair and I quickly retreated to the tiled side of the floor. With the door closed, I’d have fifteen good minutes for myself to sort this out.
I gently began closing it, pulling my head from his reach. “I’ll be out in two shakes.” I stared at his puppy-dog eyes and held up two fingers with my other hand.
How did I get here?
Chapter Nine
I went downst
airs and could not imagine I’d be seeing the person I saw sitting on the sofa with Wesley. Mark! I nearly tripped on my way and luckily white-knuckled the banister to catch my clumsiness. Wesley saw me first. His eyes grew in size and tried to say what his mouth couldn’t: Houston, we have a problem.
Mark stood as I finished off the last step more gracefully than the other fifteen of Frankenstein-style walking. Wesley rose to his feet, too. Tyler sat, unfazed by the pending atomic bomb about to detonate, and Claire pulled candlesticks off the dining room table, a keen but semi-tipsy eye being kept on the action unfolding.
“Honey, look, it’s Dr. Reilly. He was in the area and stopped by to see us.” Wesley practically spit as he shouted out the falsified information.
I heard my throat muscles swallow loudly in my ears. My eyes never left Mark.
“Hello.” I wanted to get closer. His hair looked a bit whipped, his beard was scruffy, and his tie dangled from his neck like a loose tooth. He must’ve been running on coffee, because as I got closer I could see the multiple intersections of blood vessels in his eyes.
“Can we talk?” he said in almost a whisper.
“Sure.” I looked around for Margaret and Jeff, who had thus far not showed up for the unexpected guest.
“We’ll go outside.” I directed my comment to Wesley.
“Let’s all go, if you don’t mind.” He looked at Tyler, who was zoned while some documentary played on the television. “Jeff and Margaret ran out to get bread or something. If they come back, at least we can say the doctor came to see me too.”
“Sure, that’s fine.”
Mark waited for me to go first. So much was processing in my head at that moment. In essence, I’d pulled the pin on the grenade that ended our relationship, threw it, and ran like a fugitive. It seems I had only a day on the lam until he caught up with me. Now what would I say? I never figured on this part of the breakup: face-to-face combat.
Just as we were exiting the door, Jeff and Margaret walked onto the porch. You would’ve thought Jeff had seen a ghost.
“Dr. Reilly! What are you doing here? Is something wrong?”
I swear he turned three shades of paste waiting for the answer.
“Mr. Tillion, not at all. I’m here on personal business. I was in the area and dropped in to see Wesley and Amy. Wesley was my patient earlier this year.”
Jeff grabbed his chest and sighed in relief. “Of course, I’d forgotten.” He stole a look toward his wife. “Well then, do come in and visit. We’re having dinner in a few hours. Maybe you’d like to stay.”
“Thank you, but I’m having dinner with family later. I appreciate it, though.”
Jeff smiled and walked past us into the house. I didn’t know what just happened, other than Wesley and I would be interrogated later about Mark’s mysterious visit. I would be glad when this day was over. Especially the next couple of minutes, when I had to face Mark and tell him why I couldn’t leave with him. Why did he go and mess up what we had going?
“If you want, we can go down to the pier. I’ll just wait while you all can talk in the boathouse.” Wesley was being unusually congenial about the whole situation. Thank goodness.
“Sure, okay.” I glanced at Mark. His eyes were tired and his lips seemed glued shut…in the shape of a frown.
Mark didn’t say anything on the way there. I knew he was saving it all for when we were alone. Lucky me. Just do it, already. Smack me around a little bit for being a schmuck and delivering that horrible note. Pull out the tiny hairs next to my ears—the ones that make your eyes water if the hairbrush gets a little tangled in that area. Just do something more than look at me with the pit of sorrow in the pupils of his eyes. It wasn’t my fault he was moving to Chicago. I didn’t make a call to a friend, who knew of a guy, who would be quitting in the next day or so.
When we made it there, I walked toward the corner of the boathouse for my flogging. It was damp in there. The dark boards allowed little light to shine through. And it smelled like wet bird feathers. I tried not to turn up my nose. I didn’t want it to be construed as the feelings I had about this impromptu discussion.
“Amy.”
Oh, gosh. I loved and hated the way he said my name. There used to be so much joy in hearing him say it. Now it echoed like death in this dank structure.
“Before you say anything, Mark, I’m sorry for the note. I know it was immature and completely not cool to have it delivered. And then to leave so you couldn’t see me.” I looked at my feet. They didn’t know where this was going either. All they did was keep pressing harder on the knots in the wood. “It was stupid.”
“No, what was stupid was me taking a job in Chicago. Especially without talking to you first about it.”
Okay, so this was not what I was expecting. He was taking the blame? True, it was his fault, but I thought we were discussing my handling of the situation. Good to know I wasn’t the worst one in the room.
“That would’ve been nice.” I looked at where he stood motionless.
“I don’t know what was going through my mind.”
He was doing such a nice job of beating himself up, it made me want to protect him from further browbeating of himself.
“What was going through your mind was being the chief of neurology, Mark. Someone flashed a dream job in front of you and you acted on it. I don’t fault you for that.”
He stepped closer to me, reaching out to me—his hand slid behind my damp hair and cupped the back of my neck. “You must be cold. Here, put on my coat.”
He slipped off his coat and draped it around my shoulders. I was caught in his trance.
“Amy, I would never do anything that would result in losing you. You know that, don’t you?”
“I do.”
This is the part where I melted into a puddle by looking into his baby-blue eyes and forgot just where Chicago was. Forgot that being a new chief meant never being home. Forgot that I had no friends or life there…. Forgot all the dreams of a future I thought we’d have.
“In fact, I thought it would be healthy for our relationship to move away from here.”
“What? How could it be healthier in Chicago than it would be here?”
I saw his Adam’s apple bob before he spoke. “I felt like if you were away with me, that you wouldn’t be able to see Tom anymore.”
My face did that thing. The “say what” look, with tons of folds in my brow. My eyes squinted with “what in the world are you talking about” stamped on my forehead.
“Tom? What does Tom have to do with any of this?”
Okay, okay. I know Mark and Tom are not the best of friends. Okay, they really don’t like each other, period. But I make a conscious effort never to bring up the other one’s name when I’m with them.
“Don’t act like you don’t know how I feel about you and Tom, Amy.”
“You don’t like him because of some sort of male dominance thing.” I imagine gorillas in the jungle beating their chests over what trees are the domain of the leader. Mark was the one beating his chest now.
“I don’t like him because I know his agenda with you. And no matter how many times I tell you, it doesn’t seem to matter to you.”
“It does matter. Things that matter to you matter to me. But you’re wrong about Tom and me. It’s strictly friendship. Mark, I’ve never had someone close before who I could confide in, tell things to, and have a great time with.”
“That’s what I thought I was for.”
I cleared my throat. He had a valid point. But so did I. It was different. “You are more than that. You are the guy I can snuggle with while telling things to. It’s not the same with Tom. He is only a friend.”
Mark sighed. “Okay, I don’t want my last moments in this glorious, smelly boathouse to be talking about Tom. You just don’t get how the guy gets under my skin. You never will, I guess.”
Great! I hated how this had become an argument. Not like it was anything new. The only time we fought, it was
over Tom. I couldn’t go out with him on the nights Mark worked without it being a conspiracy to bring Mark down. It was obvious we had more issues than Chicago.
“Mark, you have to take this job.” I looked down at my restless feet again. “Actually, I know you’ve already taken it, but you have to know why I can’t come with you.”
“It’s selfish of me to even ask you.”
“It’s not entirely. I’d like to think you’d ask because I mean something to you.” I smiled a little and held his cheek in my hand. He covered it with his warm hand.
“You mean everything to me.”
“I made myself a promise after my epic-fail-of-a-marriage with Wesley, that I wouldn’t do anything…I wouldn’t say anything that I didn’t truly mean. But, I lied to you.”
His brow furrowed. “What did you lie about?”
“I know we’ve been dating for a few months, but moving in together before my divorce was final was something I really didn’t want to do. It’s not that I didn’t love you; it’s just not the way I was brought up.”
“And moving to Chicago—”
“I’m not comfortable with at all.” I took his hand and held it tightly in mine. “I love you, Mark. But I don’t want to move away from all that I know…from everyone I know, to sit and wait for you to come home after a twelve-hour shift at the hospital and collapse from exhaustion.” I shook my head. “That sounds extremely shallow, because if I loved you it shouldn’t matter where we were, but I’m not there yet, I guess. I was hoping we could continue what we had and let nature take its course. I was hoping…”
I couldn’t say it. To say I was hoping he’d propose sounded childish and naive. But I was hoping it, nevertheless. Moving in with my boyfriend while I was still married to my husband was really stretching my moral cord. Moving to Chicago with him under the same circumstances just might break it altogether.
“You were hoping I’d stay at Mercer as a resident doctor, you’d continue clerking, and we’d live happily ever after?”
Well, not like that. That sounded cheap and uneventful. Boring and lame. Been there, done that.
Leaving Amy (Amy #2) Page 8