by Tawna Fenske
“Nonviolent Communication,” Jenna supplied, feeling stupid and out of place uttering the words. “With handguns.”
“Right,” Ellen said, frowning. “I’m not familiar with that method.”
Adam cleared his throat. “So what brings you here, Ellen?”
“Oh, just came out for girls’ night. I took up target shooting as a hobby last year, so this helps me unwind. Blow off a little steam, you know?”
“Absolutely,” Jenna said, remembering how frustrated Mia had been when she’d learned about Ellen’s new hobby.
“She keeps guns in the house with Katie,” Mia had said, raking her fingers through her bright red hair. “Guns! With a twelve-year-old sleeping down the hall.”
Thinking of Mia filled Jenna with a lukewarm mix of fondness and guilt, and she forced herself to turn her attention back to the conversation at hand.
“So, it’s been good seeing you,” Adam said. His tone was almost normal now, but Jenna could see the tension in his jaw. “Take care, Ellen.”
Ellen blinked, visibly surprised by the dismissal. “Of course. I hope you’re doing well, Adam. All things considered.”
“It’s water under the bridge,” he answered. “Let bygones be bygones. Forgive and forget and all that.”
He was spewing clichés like some sort of broken motivational tape, so Jenna mustered up the most genuine smile she could, and made her best effort to save him from whatever was troubling him. “It’s great running into you, Ellen. I saw Katie the other day. She’s growing into such a smart, beautiful young woman. You must be so proud.”
Ellen’s eyes narrowed, and Jenna wondered where she’d misspoken. Was it the reminder that Katie had Mia in her life? Another female role model who was nothing at all like Ellen herself?
“Right,” Ellen said, nodding sharply before turning away. “Have a nice night, you two.”
“Shoot hard,” Adam called. “Or shoot well. Or—” He shook his head and lowered his voice. “Whatever the fuck you wish someone at a shooting range.”
Jenna watched as Ellen vanished into the crowd. When she was certain the woman was out of earshot, she turned back to Adam.
“What the hell was that?”
“What do you mean?” His expression was less guarded now, but he hadn’t unclenched his jaw.
“You acted like you were being forced to make conversation with a serial killer.”
“Not a serial killer. Maybe someone convicted of chronic jaywalking or a few instances of petty theft.”
“What?”
“It was a metaphor.” He sighed and took a step forward with the line. “There’s some history there.”
“Besides the fact that she used to be married to the guy who stole your wife?”
He flinched at the words, and Jenna instantly regretted them. She opened her mouth to apologize, but he’d already moved on.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“How do you mean? Mark and Ellen had been divorced for a while when he and Mia had their—” she stopped, cleared her throat of the word affair. “When Mark and Mia got together. Mia told me Ellen and Mark divorced more than a year before that.” She paused as it occurred to her she only knew Mia’s version of the story. “Right?”
Adam shrugged. “Sort of. Mark and Ellen split up, but they were working on patching things up. Dating again, trying to see if they could make it work. For their daughter’s sake, and because there was a lot of history there. Then Mia came along and derailed things.”
Something flared in Jenna. Defensiveness for her friend, and maybe a touch of annoyance at being in this situation in the first place. “According to Ellen.” Jenna wasn’t sure if she meant it as a question or a statement, and she saw Adam’s brow’s lift ever so slightly.
“You don’t believe it?” he asked. “That Mia would knowingly wreck someone else’s relationship?”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I mean, obviously I know about what happened with your marriage. She was up front with me from day one. She takes full responsibility for the affair, Adam.”
“Okay,” he said. It sounded like agreement, but his jaw was still clenched tight.
“I’m just saying, I think she would have told me if the affair broke up two marriages instead of one. That’s all.”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe,” she said, not sure why it did. The line moved forward and Jenna shuffled along with it, only dimly aware of the hum of female voices around her and the distant crack of gunfire. “Is it possible Mark never told Mia he and Ellen were trying to patch things up?”
“Anything’s possible. Is anyone ever the villain in their own version of a story?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that when someone has an affair—” his face twisted a little on that word, and Jenna longed to reach for his hand, but she stayed still. “When someone has an affair, that person can always find a way to justify it in their mind. In their explanations to other people. Even if they admit later on that it wasn’t the right choice, deep down, they can tell the story in a way that convinces you it was a reasonable choice.”
“So what’s the alternative?” she asked, surprised by the prickliness in her own voice. “You want her to wear a scarlet letter? To don a hair shirt and spend the rest of her life hiding in a cave doing penance? People make mistakes, Adam. It happens all the time, and they can’t be expected to spend the rest of eternity being punished for it.”
Adam shook his head and took a deep breath. “Look, I don’t want to argue about this. I’m sorry. This is a tender subject for me, and yeah, I’ll admit it—it bothers me sometimes to know you’ve only heard Mia’s side of the story.”
“Is there a side you want me to hear?”
“No. I’m not interested in an endless game of he said, she said.” He shook his head again and took another step forward with the line. “I just want you to consider the possibility that things are more complicated than it might seem. It’s not a simple case of, ‘her husband neglected her, so she had an affair,’ nor is it a cut-and-dried instance of ‘his evil wife cheated and broke his heart.’ Both stories are completely true and completely false, and we can’t pick just one to believe.”
“Okay,” Jenna said, glancing up to see they’d almost reached the front of the line. Ellen was nowhere to be seen, which was a bigger relief than it should have been. Jenna took a few calming breaths and tried to steer the conversation onto slightly safer ground. “How did you know Mark’s ex-wife, anyway? Did you join a support group of thwarted exes or something like that?”
“Something like that,” Adam said, and took a step to the front of the line. “I slept with her.”
Chapter Nine
Adam followed Jenna to their assigned lane, keeping a wary distance. Her shoulders were rigid and her pace was so brisk he practically had to jog to keep up.
When they reached the last lane on the end, she spun to face him with an expression that was all business. “Are you right-handed or left?”
“Right.”
“Is that comfortable in your hand?”
“Yes,” Adam answered, weighing the gun in his palm as he watched Jenna’s face for any sign of what she was really thinking. “Heavier than I expected, but yes.”
“You’ve got your ear protection?”
“Yes.”
Adam waited for the next question, pretty sure none of the questions were what she really wanted to ask him. They’d marched through the business of flashing their IDs and choosing their weapons and finding their position, all without any further comment from Jenna about his history with Ellen.
They had ten more minutes until the range was hot—a term he’d learned just five minutes ago—but Jenna’s body language was downright chilly. He could see the tension in her shoulders, but she kept her focus on the box
of ammo she was tearing open with more force than it probably required.
“Jenna?”
“Yeah?” She didn’t look up.
“Do you want me to explain? To tell you more about what happened between Ellen and me?”
She shrugged and looked up. “Is it any of my business?” Her tone was softer than her words, but Adam could see something flashing in her eyes.
“It seems like something’s bothering you, and it started right before we got our guns. Either you’re uncomfortable with what I told you about Ellen, or you’re more upset than I realized that all the Glocks were rented.”
Jenna sighed and closed her eyes, letting the box of ammo rest on the narrow counter beside her. When she opened her eyes, she looked conflicted. “It’s never going to be simple between us, is it?”
“Couldn’t you say that about any relationship?”
“Sure, any relationship where one partner has bumped uglies with half the people the other person knows.”
“You’re giving me more credit than I deserve for sexual prowess. For the record, it was two times and it was almost three years ago.”
She sighed and set the box of ammo down on the counter. They had some measure of privacy here in the little lane that separated them from the other shooters, but it was still a public place. He could hear gunfire in the distance from the outdoor rifle range, but things were eerily quiet in the space around them.
“It’s fine, Adam. We both have a history. I’m just not used to the men I date having this much history with the women I know. I’m okay. It’s really none of my business, is it?”
He could tell she wanted to ask more, but something held her back. Pride? Embarrassment? Uncertainty about whether she really wanted to open this can of worms?
Adam went ahead and opened it for her. “I was pretty devastated when I found out my wife was sleeping with someone else. At first I tried to fix it. I asked her to give me three months of intensive marriage counseling to see if we could repair the marriage.”
Jenna glanced away, fingering one of the pistols. She’d chosen two different guns for them, suggesting they could trade back and forth to give him a feel for firing both a .32 and a .22. He wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but he’d nodded anyway.
She picked up the one the clerk had called a Kel-Tec, turning it over in her hand without comment. “Did Mia agree? To the counseling, I mean.”
“At first. We went for two weeks, but it became obvious she’d already made up her mind. That’s often the way it works with marriage counseling. It’s usually about saying hello or saying goodbye. For us, there was no hope of starting over. No chance of hello. So after a couple weeks, we threw in the towel and said goodbye.”
He watched her throat move as she swallowed. A blast of gunfire sounded somewhere outside, but she didn’t jump. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m fine now, but I was in a pretty dark place then. That’s where I was when Ellen found me.”
“She reached out to you?”
Adam nodded and set his own weapon on the counter beside the box of ammo. It wasn’t loaded, but the damn thing still gave him the willies. Even so, he felt ridiculous holding it in the midst of a conversation like this.
“After Mark told her their reconciliation wasn’t going to work, Ellen wanted to know why. After he told her about Mia, Ellen tracked her down. Said she wanted to meet ‘the other woman.’ Eventually, that led Ellen to me.”
Jenna was fiddling with a button that moved the target, making the paper outline of a head and shoulders zoom back and forth absurdly. She didn’t seem to realize she was doing it, so Adam said nothing.
“So you met Ellen.”
He nodded and watched the paper man bob back and forth, the head and shoulders waving like a bizarre white flag. “She thought we could support each other, maybe work together to bring our spouses back.”
Jenna met his eyes again. “And you thought having sex with each other might do that?”
He choked back a laugh. “No. Not at first. But when we realized our efforts were futile, we turned to each other for comfort. I knew it was stupid even before I did it. But people don’t always make the smartest decisions when they’re grieving.”
She snorted. “Tell me about it.”
Something in her tone told him there was a story there, but now didn’t seem like the time to push. “You can relate?”
“Who can’t?” She picked up the box of ammo and began loading bullets into the clip, a gesture Adam took as an end to that line of questioning. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she said. “This is fascinating, in a way. I mean, I’ve heard of this before. Of the spouses who get cheated on finding their way into each other’s beds and arms. Isn’t it some sort of psychological phenomenon or something?”
“I don’t think there’s an actual syndrome, if that’s what you mean. I think there was a country singer who married her best friend’s ex after the friend stole her husband.”
“Shania Twain, right—I remember that.”
Adam raised an eyebrow. “Are gun fanatics required to be country music fans?”
“Are head shrinkers required to be patronizing assholes?”
“Touché,” he agreed, glad she was smiling when she said it. “Anyway, it’s easy to fall prey to that sort of fantasy. That maybe all the bad stuff happened for a reason, and now we can live happily ever after with the right person who just magically appeared out of the ashes of the affair.”
She nodded and flipped the lever on the gun to make it so it wouldn’t fire. At least that’s what Adam hoped it was. He had no idea what any of the parts were called, so he settled for watching her hands move over the intricate pieces of metal and wood. The clerk had called this one a .22 Mark III Hunter with a fluted five-inch barrel, and Adam had flinched at the word Mark.
Then he’d felt stupid for doing it, and forced himself to choose that gun just to prove he wasn’t bothered by it. That his ego could handle using a firearm that shared a name with the guy his wife had left him for. Christ, did the echoes of ex-lives ever get quieter, or was it just a matter of learning to ignore the noise?
Jenna picked up the other weapon and slid the clip into it, and it occurred to him this was the weirdest setting he’d ever had for a heart-to-heart discussion about relationships.
“So things didn’t work out with you and Ellen?” she asked.
“Not even close. Like I said, it only happened a couple times. It wasn’t long after that she moved away, so we really never talked about it after that.”
He waited for more questions, for a reaction that would tell him how she was feeling. She had every right to be weirded out by this. How often did a woman get together with a guy and discover she’s surrounded by females who’ve shared his bed or his heart or some combination of the two?
Still, they both had histories. She’d said it herself. Wasn’t this what modern dating was like most of the time?
She slid the clip into the other gun, seeming to decide something. When she met his eyes again, there was an odd sense of calm there.
“Come on,” she said, adjusting her earphones before fitting the gun into her palm. “Let’s blow the shit out of something.”
It was close to midnight by the time Jenna pulled the car to the curb outside Adam’s hotel and turned to face him. He watched her in the dim glow of the streetlight, a fresh pang of longing sliding over the current of adrenaline still pulsing under the surface of his skin.
“That was hands-down the best unromantic non-date I’ve ever had,” he said. “Maybe we should give the Marxist discussion a try next time.”
She laughed, leaning back against the headrest to reveal the smooth column of her throat, and Adam ached to kiss her there.
“You did great for your first time,” she said, and for a moment, Adam was still hung up on
the kissing thing. “Once you got the hang of it, your aim was pretty good.”
“Thanks. If this mediation thing doesn’t work out, I can always fall back on joining a gang.”
He unhooked his seatbelt and turned so his whole body was angled toward her. “Seriously, Jenna. I had a really great time with you.”
“Me, too. Spending time with you is just—”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t have to. She was smiling, albeit a little wistfully, but that was enough.
Adam sighed and reached out to lay a hand on her knee. “I know when we first hooked up, we thought it was just a quick fling. When we realized it couldn’t be more than that, I figured it was no big deal. There are other fish in the sea and all that. But every minute I spend with you—”
He stopped there, not sure what he meant to say. Not sure what he could say that wouldn’t make this whole thing harder.
“I know,” she said, swallowing. And he felt certain she did know. For some reason, words seemed to be failing both of them now. Perhaps it was the late hour, or maybe it was that there was too much they could say.
“We won’t be working together forever,” he said, reaching up to brush a lock of hair off her cheek. He left his hand there, and she leaned into it like a cat craving the touch.
Her cheek felt smooth under his palm, and for a moment they just sat there connected by only the lightest feather of contact.
“My contract with Belmont will end in a month or two,” he said. “After that, we wouldn’t have to worry about the professional side of things. About your employer claiming it’s a conflict of interest or anything like that.”
He waited for her protest, but it wasn’t the one he expected.
“You live in Chicago,” she said. “That’s a long ways away.”
“I travel all over the country for my work. It doesn’t matter that much what city I call my home base.”
“What are you saying?”